The Beautiful Answer

Anticipation

I read about this experiment today, in which a scientist tried to create the most viscous material ever. It was 1927 and the scientist was Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. He poured hot pitch into a glass funnel and then let it cool while his class of students waited for the results. In about eight years, yes eight years, the first drop fell. After nine more years, another drop finally separated itself from the others and made its way downward to join the first. 

That kind puts patience into perspective. 

Since 1927, a total of eight drops have fallen. What is the purpose of this, you ask? Why would someone purposely torture himself and his students by doing this? 

I like to think it’s uncertainty. We don’t know when the next drop will fall. Maybe also unpredictability. Think about it. In the wide open flow of time that makes up our lives, do we really ever know what’s going to happen? No. And if we did, we would never willingly choose to go through half the shit that comprises our human reality. It’s too painful, too messy and devoid of fun. 

If we’re being honest here, pretty much nothing is really in our control. And maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe the beauty is in the surprise, the up and down of our emotions, the high of our highs and the low of our lows. Maybe it’s the anticipation that the very next moment of our lives could spin us in a completely new direction, an amazing and true direction, and that this in itself is pretty damn special indeed. 

Participation Isn’t Optional

It’s been quite a day — one for reflection and growth, and another for sheer annoyance. Someone I’ve been reading for more than a year and a half placed an order for a reading only to completely flip out a few hours later, calling me several names, getting belligerent and issuing threats. She was obviously in a lot of emotional pain about something in her life, but no amount of my apologies or money refunding would convince her that I was anything but someone who lived to take advantage of other people and make their lives miserable. Why it took her a year and a half and around 15 readings to figure that out, I have no idea. 

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it’s not personal. Of course it’s not. And I’ve been doing it long enough to know that no one’s perfect. Not even me. :)  It was the entitlement that was so stunning about it, the idea that she thought I owed her something because her life hadn’t turned out the way she wanted it to.  That was really jaw dropping. As if I somehow predicted a hard and fast truth and if it didn’t happen, or not in the timeframe she had deemed appropriate, somehow I was responsible. As if energy doesn’t change form time to time, and she didn’t have to participate in the creation of her own reality. 

Let me break it down for you. Participation isn’t optional. It’s mandatory. Attendance is taken every day and, if you’re not there, it’ll go down in your permanent record. The real one, where no one really cares if you’re there, but it still has the power to make you happy or sad, fulfilled or empty, all the time, every day, for the rest of your life. 

Believe that. 

If you don’t participate sure, you might be able to cast off whatever you don’t feel like dealing with onto someone else. Picking a fight here, or creating some drama there. Maybe you’re so used to the drama that when you don’t have it in your life, you create it just to feel alive. Maybe you can find an enabler who lets you foist off your drama onto him or her long enough that your discomfort relents temporarily, and the relationship gets used up in five days, weeks or months, only to send you back to the drawing board, hungry for someplace else to place your uncomfortable feelings. 

Me? I’m done with it, and anyone else who comes into my reality this way. I have a huge soft spot for the struggling, the people who recognize their imperfections and work on them, just trying to be a little better, a little healthier each day. I am far from perfect, so I don’t expect it in others. Part of me doesn’t even believe it’s possible, so who cares? I am as much a healer as a psychic, and if you’re not up for it, that’s fine with me. 

So I sat in meditation for a bit, looking for ways to reframe what was essentially unreframable (that’s totally  not a word). Teasing the strands apart, I saw what she had brought to it, what I refused to take on, and how it had inflamed the situation between us. I saw that I had few other options, really, and so I chose not to take it any further. I don’t need to be right; I need be heard, and to at least be granted the opportunity to make my point. If it’s not received, I can’t help that. I can only release with peace, refusing to bring any more suffering, and wish her well. 

No Time for This Crap

It’s a rare and special morning when you wake up and before you’ve even had some tea or water, you’ve been assaulted with people’s negativity, self-serving rants and dysfunction approximately ten or fifteen times. I’m taking a stand, people. I’m sick of this shit. None of us — not you, or you, or you — has the time for this crap. 

Stuff exists. Pain hurts. Every one of us will experience it, as well as death, eventually. If you’re lucky, you’ll live a relatively pain-free life, maybe just having your heart broken once or twice and moving on. If you’re not, maybe you’ll lose someone close to you, or experience a terminal disease. Whatever the case, we’re lucky to be here. Believe me on that one. 

It’s human to complain, I suppose, but I’ve noticed a severe uptick around me in that department lately. It’s as if the economy, or life, or not having what they want somehow gives people permission to express their discontent. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a good listener and a better friend. But complaining is not our divine human right. In fact, it’s a huge waste of time after the intitial hurt or frustration has been expressed. 

And when things as beautiful, as transcendentally gorgeous as this exist, there’s no damn time to waste:

So get out there and make something beautiful today. Don’t complain about why you can’t, make like Nancy Reagan and just do it. And if that requires risk of some kind, when you’re good and ready, make that leap. 

What’s Next?

Painful experience over? Check. Throbbing emotions for a few days following?  Also check. Knowing where to go next? Not quite yet.

I’ve been writing for over 25 years on a pretty much daily basis. I may give in when I’m sick with a cold, in the hospital, depressed over the results of an election (sigh, the Bush years) or on vacation. But not always. I may take breaks if I need to gather my thoughts, re-outline, throw shitty passages out or just get some new perspective. But reading is at least part of that, as well as using the structuring part of my brain to think my way out of something, or around it.

But after recent events unfolded (ahem), I thought it would be best to just see when I felt like returning to writing, in as much of an organic fashion as I could. OK, it’s only been a few days. I have a lot of freelance stuff coming in, including editing a self-help book and two screenwriting assignments. But my own work isn’t quite ready to come back out into the world yet.

I’ve been working on a play that’s very close to my heart for a few months now, and it’s almost done. But I keep having to put it down to write for someone else — articles, books, screenplays, you name it. Hey, I’m happy for the work. You’re not going to hear me complaining. When I feel my creativity knocking on the door again, I’ll finish those last few pages — maybe even by the end of the month.

Until then, I’m reframing my ambition, which normally runs around pretty much unchecked, by telling it that what’s next may be the coolest words in the English language.

Transcendence To Go

Sometimes you find transcendence when you’re not even looking for it. I love it when that happens. The last couple of days haven’t been easy. They’ve taught me a lot, and caused me to set a new long-term course in my life. So bad news/good news there.

Once I experience pain, I’m so busy wanting to feel better, trying to work through whatever’s made me fall off the happiness wagon, that I don’t expect anything. I hope that the painful stuff starts to dissipate, and my worn-out eyes start to focus on what’s good about my life again. It’s like I’m a giant focusing telescope, and I have to swing myself around to face a completely different landscape.

So when I find something that at first seems accidental, it’s like the universe has sent me a little gift. That’s what happened when I ran across this poem in a magazine today: 

“What is it you want to change? Your hair, your face, your body? Why? For God is in love with all those things and He Might weep when they are gone.”

— St. Catherine of Siena

It felt like someone had hosed me down with liquid nitrogen. I froze, feeling my blood shock my veins. My perceptions froze as well, as time seemed to slow down and the song on the radio began to assume a grander sort of importance. With all my senses hanging in the balance, I saw beyond the moment — to healing, to new moments, to challenges, love, acceptance and total integration. I saw beauty and forgiveness, and true understanding of what these times of doubt really are — opportunities to continue. Nothing more, nothing less.

Embracing the Formerly Unthinkable

I kind of wish I had a portable MRI machine, to measure the changes in my brain since I began this blog. I’ve read a ton of articles on how meditation changes the brain over time, and even participated in a study at UCLA to measure these changes. In that particular study, they found that the area of the brain associated with measuring our reactive responses, and the part that produces feelings of compassion, were actually made thicker as the person meditated. Pretty damn cool.

So far, my brain has been so affected by writing this blog each day, and reframing my experience in order to do so, that I want nothing more than to embrace the formerly unthinkable.  OK, it took my brain a little while to wrap itself around that concept, but it’s been coming up again and again over the past few days for me. Of course it’s difficult to manifest something you can’t see, and for which you may have no point of reference. But what if I were to reframe that, by embracing that which I can’t see, or maybe even understand?

Maybe it’s like the Buddhist concept of softening around whatever hurts you, in order to “make friends” with the suffering and thereby release it (or at the very least, stop feeding it). It’s the last thing we want to do, because pain hurts. We want it to go away, quickly. And most of us feel the same way about uncertainty, or things we don’t know, aren’t familiar with, and can’t categorize.

Embracing the unthinkable means that I may be able to be a little more comfortable with the changes that come my way, and maybe even get used to the exciting but scary change awaiting me in the future. Because even though we say we want great stuff, most of us, if we’re being honest, would have to admit that actually having that stuff would make us nervous. Too much would have to change. So today, I reframe my experience to throw off those old beliefs in favor of embracing the formerly unthinkable, and allowing my life to be transformed as a result.