I like to think of myself as a positive person. I’m a look-on-the-bright-side kinda gal, sometimes to my detriment. I make lemonade out of lemons when perhaps I should find a different fruit. To me, the glass is half full, but as Larry Winget points out, it’s more important what’s in that glass. It doesn’t much matter if it’s half full or half empty when it’s a glassful of urine.
A couple years ago, I promised myself that I was going to start telling the truth. The Truth. It wasn’t about anyone else, it was about acknowledging what was in my heart, if only to myself. It was a promise that shook up my life because when you acknowledge the truth of your being, you are listening to your soul. And once you start listening to your soul, things that are no longer appropriate in your life, fall away. Kind of like an old hairstyle or the day glo socks from the ‘80’s that you would never wear again.
I have spent the past 8 months in contemplation. My life was sorely out of balance and I didn’t know what else to do but to remove myself from the environment I was in and look for peace in the stillness of the country. Funny thing about that: Wherever you go, you take *you* with you. And removing distractions only puts the real issues under the magnifying glass. Socrates said, Know thyself. What happens when the you that you thought you knew is not at all who you really are? John says, Who you are is someone you made up and got comfortable with. Dave Dobson likes to say, Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Most people will postpone their lives indefinitely to stay comfortable. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, as the saying goes.
“And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~ Anais Nin
John has remarked that most women are leading lives of dissatisfaction, and awaken to that realization somewhere between the ages of 35-50. And then they fall apart. They wake up one morning and ask, Is this IT? I can attest that it was a question I asked myself. Did God really put me on the planet for THIS??? One day I confided to a friend that I was asking these dangerous questions. She said, They’re dangerous because you’re playing with fire and fire burns away to the truth. That it does. And the truth was that I woke up with the desperate desire to live a conscious life by design. Not out of habit or patterns. I wanted the joy I felt in my meditations to translate into the rest of my life. And it wasn’t. It was helping me to cope and it was helping me to continue on down an inevitable path of self-doubt.
The falling-apart part is the letting go of old patterns; patterns of thinking, patterns of behaving, patterns of responding or reacting. The pieces chip away like a sculpture, to reveal the Authentic Self, that part of our being that Sarah Ban Breathnach so eloquently describes in her books. The Authentic Self who doesn’t bow down to social convention or other people’s opinions. The Self that says, “Do this, go that way,” when logic would dictate otherwise because the Authentic Self cares nothing of common sense. It is the intellect that needs to have an explanation or reason before taking action. The Authentic Self is a leap of Faith. Trouble is, I have been trying to keep one foot behind on solid ground and we all know that you can’t make a leap like that. A leap doesn’t come in steps.
It reminds me of the story of a person standing at the edge of a cliff with an angel.
The angel says, “Come to the edge.”
She says, “But I’m afraid.”
“Come to the edge.”
And she says, “I can’t."
So the angel pushes her.
She flies.
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” ~Martin Luther King
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