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“Your state of mind is everything.” Bruce Lee

Oh, man, this one is a beauty, having everything to do with the subject and not my forthcoming writing about it. I wouldn’t even dream to touch it, without having met the Buddha on the road one day. I confess to being someone, who admires this guy. I find it so difficult to imagine that every now and then, there are angels walking among us. They see with a kind of clarity that pierces the souls of us all. What he shares is meant to be experienced, neither explained or understood.

In general, when most of us think about states, it quickly gravitates in the direction of politics, which is exactly what got me out on this creative limb in the first place. The challenge is to live in the world as it is, immersed in it, yet apart from it. It has to do with what state you’re in. What state you are in is your relationship with yourself and that’s the one I’m talking about.

Being alive is the most intimate space to occupy, immersed in every imaginable, trumpeting tribute to the moment. In the mirror,  it can pose the same threat as an emotional riptide, shredding your soul and drowning you, absent any breath of hope. I think for many, the world as it is, has become a suffocating twin being, sucking our life force away, while we even bare witness to it.

It is so easy to feel disenfranchised and impotent, powerless to make any kind of difference, because these forces are made to appear gigantic, beyond our reach. I guess it also depends on where you want to battle these bionic demons. The only hope of besting these dark forces is to stage a shoot-out on your own turf, the comfortable one, where you live everyday. It is situated between your ears, anchored by the force of the heart, just below.

You want to debate what’s in store for all of us when we comfortably nail the 1.5C temperature increase, which we will? You want to justify how Russia could blow up a hospital in Ukraine? What right does our Supreme Court have to dictate to a women, regarding her body? While I am thinking about the next word, countless little children have died from starvation, often in the absence of a familiar face. This stuff can get stuck in your throat and suffocate you. It can be a dangerous emotional place to reside.

I wrote all the above yesterday and have had time to think about it, all day today. I think about my own journey in this context as well. This story has been in my head all week. I don’t know, but when I initially thought about playing with the idea of the state of mind, I immediately thought about melding it with the political use of the same word. Without a personal state of mind, you wander without a home, too.

The idea for this story at least started out with my trying to figure out a way forward for so many of us. Actually, that is not really true either. I wanted to come up with a way of discussing how it’s possible to become overcome with joy at any moment, having nothing to do with the larger stage, just over your shoulder. Our light can brighten us, even buried in the darkness that surrounds it.

OK, I have good one. I am on the deck of the Titanic. I know for certain I am going to die. How would I want to behave under those circumstances? The cameras are rolling and what is the story I want to tell? How would I want to be memorialized? I think that is the state of mind I’m talking about. Who have you been in your life and where do you take comfort? 

Telling this story is the story of my life. I think I’ve wondered about this kind of shit for years and years, an early affliction. I’ve never been  sure what I am doing here. Are you supposed to do something that will make you immortal in the annals of human greatness? Do you just satisfy yourself with finding joy in your life? Those arelike the goal posts of my story. In my game, coupled with advanced chronology, it is more important how you play the game, rather than points scored.

In my early thirties, I had run out of any emotional ammunition to shoot back at life when it got too close. I kind of felt like I was succumbing to its strangle hold, rather than its embrace.

It was therapy for the kid. I was in the swim for around ten years. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t have that “experience”, a word that can’t touch how my life was launched on an emotional rocket ship into galaxies of consciousness and clarity I didn’t know existed before.

Back then, the Buddha became like a lifeguard in my emotional tsunami. We have remained friends over the years. I liked this guy as soon as I started to learn about him. I would say he has provided the frame in which my life painting takes place, not getting in the way, allowing it all to unfold exactly that way it is supposed to.

The mind is huge in Zen. If you think you are too smart or not smart enough, you miss the point. The mind is much more than intellect, it is everything. You are not to be measured against anyone else. You fit perfectly into who you are at any given moment, no tape measure required. 

I decided to bring my mind into view by writing, making it a witness to itself. In the years since I began, the world has changed, becoming unrecognizable, at least to me. As a kid, it was all about promise and possibility. Now, it feels like I have face planted on a monstrous, impenetrable wall of ice cold steel. Fairy tales are now even science fiction.

This discipline for me is an attempt to make sense of the world, both without and within, hoping to communicate that to at least one other. In a way, the more discordant our surroundings, the more we need to find a refuge in ourselves, creating internal harmony. 

I don’t have a damn road map for this trip. Going forward, remember what State you’re in. It’s the face you want to see in the mirror.

That’s the State I’m talking about. Welcome!