"Live in the moment," the Divine guru told me. "That's the path to peace of mind."
I've heard that before. I think it works, for people who already have peace of mind. I think peace of mind is like a bank loan or a gym membership: to really get it, you must first prove you don't need it. Divine Gurus have peace of mind: that's kind of the definition.
I've had cause to go looking for inner peace just lately.
I've always said, quoting Conversations with God, that we're all creating the next grandest versions of the greatest visions we ever had about who we are. That, to me, almost sounds like the opposite of living in the moment. What would love do now? is a question framed in the present, but with an eye to the future.
The future has always scared me. I've detailed the reasons for that: very briefly, my parents moved around a lot when I was a kid, taking me with them, and it seemed like I could never get settled before uprooting again. So, starting very early, I developed a wide streak of "why bother? it won't work out anyway"...mixed uneasily with an overwhelming desire for the kind of stability that I felt deprived of. I've struggled to reconcile that contradiction my whole life long, and any time I bottom out it's probably because I pushed "why bother" or "goddamnit this HAS to work" too hard. One or the other. Maybe even both at once, just to be impossible, you understand.
So I took great pleasure in reading that the purpose of my life was to continually recreate myself in the grandest version of the greatest vision I ever had about who I am. Kaizen. Constant improvement, if glacially paced. It's such a noble cause, and the absolute best part of it is that it doesn't have to be defined to have that noble ring to it.
Checkup: have I improved, lately? Am I any closer to that current greatest vision? What IS that grandest vision?
Let's play Ideals. Ideally, I'm a writer. That's three full time jobs at once: writing, editing, and the one I hate, marketing, but we're playing Ideals. I don't have to make a great deal of money, or even a great deal more than I make now.
I am no closer to this than I was when I first picked up a pen. It's such a daunting process: you spend a few hours writing, and then probably at least as many hours marketing what you've written in the hopes that somebody will pick it up and pay you...eventually...and since the odds are overwhelming that they won't pay you a cent, all that writing and marketing work is wasted. So you start over. And over, and over. And maybe you get lucky and get a couple hundred bucks for an article you wrote...we'll even make it U.S. dollars....but you wrote that article ten months ago, and how many fractions of a penny an hour is that, anyway? Let that go, Ken, that's a dream that will never see reality.
Ideally, I fill some hearts and have mine filled to overflowing in return. I have experienced this ideal. I will again. I can't say I'm close -- there's no way to know, and if I've learned anything in this strange new world of polyamory, it's that there really IS no way of knowing if what you've got is built to last or not until it...lasts, or not. But I'm firmly on the road and pointed in what I hope is the right direction.
In some ways, I have improved. I have a lot more confidence than I used to have, which is paying off in small ways already and hopefully will soon pay off in actual money, in the form of a job. (I have three seminars to attend this week, one of them with job coaches who will liaise with employers on my behalf, so this joblessness should not last much longer. However, I'm examining Employment Ontario's Second Career option, which will pay a great deal of my schooling for up to two years. Still don't think we can afford it: the living allowance they pay is chintzy in the extreme. But I'm going to thoroughly check out the possibilities. Maybe we can make something work.
I have learned some lessons that were necessary to learn. One of the biggest is not to spill all those lessons out for public consumption. There are doubtless many more such lessons on the road ahead, but I think I'm better prepared for that road ahead than I might otherwise have been.
And damnit but do I have an amazing support system, headed by Eva and Mark. Thank you everyone for not abandoning me over the past tough couple of months.
Remember this: It is not nearly so important how well a message is received as how well it is sent. You cannot take responsibility for how well another accepts your truth; you can only ensure how well it is communicated. And by how well, I don’t mean merely how clearly; I mean how lovingly, how compassionately, how sensitively, how courageously, and how completely....
So yes, express what you call your most “negative” feelings, but not destructively.
Failure to express (i.e. push out) negative feelings does not make them go away; it keeps them in. Negativity “keep in” harms the body and burdens the soul.
All negativity need not be shared with the person about whom it is felt. It is only necessary to communicate these feelings to the other when failure to do so would compromise your integrity or cause another to believe an untruth.
Negativity is never a sign of ultimate truth, even if it seems like your truth at the moment. It may arise out of an unhealed part of you. In fact, always it does.
That is why it is so important to get these negativities out, to release them.
--Conversations with God, Book II, Neale Donald Walsch
Doing this. Privately again. It serves no-one make my most negative emotions public. Actually feeling them, though....really getting into the meat of them...I've come to understand that these feelings are not worthy of me. They are not reflections of truth; most of them aren't even reflections of my truth. They are emissaries from an unhealed part of me. Writing them out, you can see it plainly.
So we come to the essential question: live in the moment, or plan on improving for the future?
And lo and behold, seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be answered, IMMEDIATELY below the passage I just quoted we have this:
Some feelings are true feelings - that is, feelings born in the soul – and some feelings are counterfeit feelings. These are constructed in your mind.
In other words, they are not “feelings” at all – they are thoughts. Thoughts masquerading as feelings.
The greatest challenge as human beings is to Be Here Now, to stop making things up!
…when you come to each moment cleanly, without a previous thought about it, you can create who you are, rather than re-enact who you once were.
Life is a process of creation, and you keep living it as if it were a process of re-enactment!
Nothing is more natural than love. If you act lovingly, you will be acting naturally. If you react fearfully, resentfully, angrily, you may be acting normally, but you will never be acting naturally.
Ignore your previous experience and go into the moment. Be Here Now. See what there is to work with right now in creating yourself a new.
Remember, this is what you are doing here.
This is the purpose of all of life. Life is an ongoing, never-ending process of re-creation. You keep recreating your selves in the image of your next highest idea about yourselves.
--Ibid.
---that's something of a revelation, there. I can tell you right now there have been a number of moments I have entered into with preconceived ideas, not creating but reacting, and those were critical moments, where I most had to be open to what I was being shown. I have not being living in some kind of hazy future but more so in the recent past.
That stops. Now.
I am here, now.
Not nowhere but now, here.
No comments:
Post a Comment