“The heart of the matter is always our oneness with divine spirit, our union with all life.” Thich Nhat Hahn
You know, it probably wouldn’t surprise you when I say I tend to think a lot. Now, before you think I am crazy or trying to convince you that I am, I have purposely uncluttered my life so I can think about life. I understand it is an option many might not have, even if you wanted to.
I wouldn’t say I am a great planner, not by a long shot. I was also not a great collector through the years either. I am living a fairly stripped down version of life and certainly there are some that would justifiably resent me for it. It’s just kind of how I am and always have been, I guess.
The very first thing I would say to anyone questioning my path, for lack of a better word, is how old are you? Now, before you go there, I wouldn’t say longevity automatically justifies a damn thing, but it sure as shit helps to explain it. I can tell you, it doesn’t make you any brighter, not by a long shot. However, your IQ Experience goes up with time and it is just a matter of how you choose to wear it.
For years and years, I was on a ride. Somehow, miraculously, at birth, I got strapped in and there were signs everywhere along the way, telling me to stay in my seat. I was a good boy, or the best I could be. I didn’t dare cast off the restraints, the emotional handcuffs of a life sentence, strangled by the expectations of others.
It’s funny, you start on a path at such an early age. Very often, who you are becoming is denied the air it needs to breathe. If you are extremely lucky, somewhere along the way, you are reminded of that time and you promise yourself to be true to it. I am not exactly sure when I died, but I did. Unceremoniously, the child gave birth to an adult, carrying the silent baggage of his past, internally muted for many, many years.
I think pain is the emotional kiln that glazes us over with a shiny kind of veneer that others can’t see, but we feel. Life starts to feel like this random continuum of events and we’re just along for the ride. Then, somewhere along the way, after years and years of unthinkingly flowing with the constant intrusion of a roller coast of endless episodes, the idea of focus quietly makes itself felt. It is unobtrusive at first, gathering traction with time.
It was somewhere in my early forties and I was dying. I had spent the prior ten years in therapies, beginning with peeling away the petals of hating my mother for being exactly who she was, jammed into a shitty situation with two young boys and no fucken money. Toward the end, I imagined myself a shepherd-poet, overlooking the hills of his ancestral lands. The spiritual trajectory was set and launch was looming.
At some point in all this emotional tumult, I decided life was calling me to leap outside myself, finding out if anyone was home. I’ll be damned, there I was. The little boy had somehow survived. Before going any further, I am in no way romanticizing a very painful time in the lives of my darling sons, scars of varying severity, lingering til this day.
I needed a friend I could talk to, without having to explain a single thing. Looking for answers outside ourselves begins at a very early age. Education is about providing us with the equipment to deal with the outside world, one transaction after another.
If any of us give shit, it is 100% our job to look inside ourselves, because no one else owns that responsibility. Education has nothing to do with educating ourselves. Therapy explores our past, hopefully setting an empty table, affording us the opportunity to serve a perfect meal, with beautifully, experiential place settings from those precious moments in our past.
The Buddha made my life feel like a journey, finally. Here was this guy, who felt the most important thing in his life was to share with others some, simple goddamn truths he had uncovered in his total devotion to this journey of a sacred soul.
I think it is our nature to wonder why we are starting on any new path, be it job, relationship, hobby or whatever else that takes center stage for us. We take a chance, with faith in the outcome, a precious moment, repeated many times.
I don’t think I was preoccupied with finding out any answers, regarding my life or the world I was inventing. Very early on, I became certain that if you actually believed you arrived at any place in particular, you blew it.
As sure as I am sitting here in my bathrobe in the fading light of day, the idea of finding the answers was never my plan, even in my most novice moments. Somehow, I knew there weren’t any and the journey to find them was all that mattered.
When we are young, the world revolves around us and that’s the way it is supposed to be. For some of us fortunate ones, it’s like being in a cocoon of security. In the beginning, the world is small, with our self-sovereignty over all. In the end, we see the world as larger than we have words for.
Whenever I am plucked from my path, I want it to be one that inescapably leads to an unmarked place, one that embraces all that is, ever was, and ever will be. It is what you learn up here.
I think about that stuff these days.