It’s not our plans, it’s how tightly we insist on them.
It’s not our possessions, it’s our attachment to them.
It’s not other people, it’s our expectations of them.
It’s not our to-do lists, it’s our constant grinding on them.
Life is all about us.
I was supposed to be in France this week, on holiday at a family wedding. But … the kids’ passports didn’t come through in time and so I stayed back here while Sumati has gone off to represent.
We – I say ‘we’, but really Sumati was the champion behind this – did everything right, and yet nothing seemed to work; nothing came through. Countless hours on the phone, driving up to passport offices, all to no avail.
So here I am holding down the fort while Sumati eats croissants and catches up on some Ascension meditation time and reading books, free of family responsibilities. Well deserved that too.
You ever had something like this?
Where you really want something to happen and yet all the doors seem to be locked tight? No matter how hard you push, for how long you try, nothing budges.
It’s fascinating to me – this balance between actively doing stuff to make sure your plans come through and yet completely surrendering to the fact that so often you’re not in control; that all we truly control is our attitude and expectations.
The question really is:
How hard and how long do you push for, and when do you know when to stop? When do you realise something is just not going to happen for you? And on the other hand, I know for sure that in the past I simply haven’t bothered, I’ve given up far too early. Or never even tried.
When, and how, do you KNOW?
I’ve spent my life looking for a rule book to tell me the right way to live, and have failed to find one.
I do think though, through rigorously testing the boundaries of being too lazy at one end and hitting my own head against locked doors at the other for quite a while now, there is no rigid rule – you just get a ‘sense’.
It’s a pretty wooly concept, this ‘sense’. You could call it intuition or instinct. Maybe some might call it experience … but it’s a kind of wisdom I talk a lot about.
The sense I personally get, the ‘wake up and pay attention’ alarm, is always a tightness, a feeling of wanting to force, of ‘I’ll be happy when my plan or expectation comes through’. A lack of patience, an anger or sorrow about a future without my idea.
That’s when I know I have to back off.
How about you? And how much do you trust it?
I think if we spent more time nurturing – and trusting – this sense, our lives would be a ton more fun, satisfying and so much more stress and struggle free. We’d also know what to do in any given situation too.
You see, when you listen and trust, you just seem to find a flow in life. Nothing is hard. Weird huh? Truly nothing is hard, even hard work itself.
You have ideas and plans and schemes and opinions, but you hold them lightly. Instead of battling life, you’re open to it showing you the easy way a ton more. You do what seems smooth and fluid and stop when it doesn’t. Maybe that’s a full-stop halt; maybe it’s a pause while you patiently wait for an opening, a gap.
Some things are 'meant' to happen; some things are simply not.
Now this is very different from procrastinating on a difficult task or conversation. Difficulty is made a million times worse by our deliberation and delaying.
As they say, if you have to eat a frog today, you’d better sit down and serve it up for breakfast. Eat it while it’s hot… i.e. stop thinking and sit down and do it first! (Turns out frogs have a ton of nutrition in them. You’re better off with a regular diet of them. True!)
But there’s a huge difference between need and want; need always results in trouble.
One of the first things I heard my Ishaya teacher say was, “I want you to get to a place where you know peace or pain in life is your personal choice, and your choice only”.
It blew my socks off at the time … I mean surely life sometimes just delivers pain to us?
Apparently not. Apparently, like a lot of things I never got in the beginning, he was right – we put ourselves through the grinder when we fight and struggle and insist and get irritated and wound up; when we forget that we can scrap our way through life or dance with it.
In a nutshell?
Go with; never against.
Intuition will tell you when you’re doing either.
Learn to listen. Be present, be mindful … it will genuinely help you get what you genuinely want from life; and make it all so much easier.
And that’s me for today.
Wish me luck with two little ones. What could possibly go wrong?
Go well!
Arjuna