Deep, deep thoughts from my Morning Pages.
Deep, deep down, I feel like the sky is always about to fall, the other shoe is about to drop, the proverbial shit about to hit proverbial fan. I’m on guard, you know you’re just going along minding your own damn business and then life happens? Yeah, like that.
Sometimes my Morning Pages consist of analysing my childhood, teens, my first relationships, adoption, as though I’m going to find the answer, the key, the one thing that’s going to make it all make sense.
As if I can stop life itself. But the past is only a bad indicator of the future in financial circles. I say analyse the shit out of life, out of yourself because the chances are you have some areas that can be improved upon. A bit of useful navel-gazing…but we can sit there for ever and try to find a reason why we get nervous, why we worry that shit is about to go down. We can look back and blame, point fingers but eventually we’re going to have to accept that this cycle…is life. The cycle only stops when we do and it’s ACTUALLY the attachment, the clinging on that makes us feel like we’re being dragged rather than just riding the waves.
The answer is to let go, to lose the attachment of what is, what should be, what could have been, just allow let it be as it is? Oh that simple, then?
I wonder how many times I’ve come to this realisation? I know it dawns on me every few months that nothing in life really means anything but the mean we imbue it with. Surely that’s bollocks, though when it comes to the truly horrible things that happen. When we lose someone we love, when your house burns down? That’s bad, right? When bombs hit your town, or when you have to leave in the night with just the clothes on your back? That’s objectively shitty stuff. That’s the challenge, isn’t it? Equanimity in the face of the worst life can throw at us?
Finding the silver lining is viewed by some as the ultimate in self-deception and by others as the ultimate in self-agency. I personally live in the state that I call Productive Paranoia. I get a lot done because I always feel that time is running out.
Feature Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
Christine, this post hits home. For a long time, I’ve struggled with a desire to control what happens, to get the job I wanted, to make the woman love me. I didn’t, so much, consciously change my thinking as experience a gestalt prompted by often meditating on two verses in Psalm 30 (Trans. by Alter):
“As for me, I thought in my quiet days,
‘Never will I stumble.’
LORD, in your pleasure You made me stand mountain-strong.
—When You hid Your face, I was stricken.”
Wow that’s a beautiful Psalm. Psalms is probably my favourite book in the bible. I also like this from the Bhagavad Gita ‘perform all actions with mind concentrated on the Divine, renouncing attachment and looking upon success and failure with an equal eye.
Thank you so much for your conversation. I really appreciate it. That’s what I love about the World Wide Web. We can find kindred spirits any where they might be. ☺️
The phrase “let it go” keeps coming up for me in various venues…I probably should do it…the universe is trying to tell me something!
Amazing phrase that! Something we all need to learn.