Today has been entirely enough. There will be more to say another time. For now, I am enjoying sufficiency, and solitude, and the calm stillness of sand, and sea and sunshine, and ‘enough’.
One perspective.
Archives for category: Free Will
I woke with a headache, still managing to be eager to face my journey – both metaphysical, and geographical; I’m headed to the coast.
Sky, sand, and a distant horizon.
There’s something about being on the shore of the ocean, either ocean really, but the one on the left side is easier to reach at the present. I’ll take a few days, celebrate the changing season, walk, meditate, write, do some yoga on the beach and not notice that I’m not a lean hard-bodied yogi under 30 all strong core, tan skin, and toned muscles; it’ll feel amazing. There is so much living that is not about appearances at all, however cool it looks in a photograph.
I will write; I am hoping to finish a manuscript. I will meditate – at this point that goes without saying (lol). I will take some pictures and enjoy capturing the world through a camera lens, while I contemplate the way I view it through the less well-defined lens of my own experience, through my all-to-human eyes.
The headache is nothing much to bother with, I think I am a tad dehydrated, and I’m alternating water and coffee this morning to get past it. It astounds me what a huge piece ‘taking care of me’ a simple drink of water is! I pause for a moment to reflect what an advancement clean drinking water is, and how many people in the world don’t have even that most basic of resources readily available in the 21st century.
Today is a good day to make a journey. Today is a good day to be kind. Today is a good day to treat myself well, and enjoy the moment. Today is a good day to change the world.
Today is the Vernal Equinox. Yes, I always capitalize that. 🙂 What could be more worth celebrating that the changing of seasons? Certainly worthy of a capital letter or two.
Nothing else needs to be said – Spring says all she must without words.
Welcome, Spring! I know you won’t stay as long as I’d like before Summer crowds you out with more rambunctious fun, but we’ll have fun while you’re here. 🙂
Today is a good day to smile, a good day to pause for flowers, for funny stories, for a moment with a friend. Today is a good day to change the world.
Interestingly – I actually am ‘positive’. I’m not sure when I got here. I was once a pretty negative, cynical woman whose sense of humor was largely based on the humor of disappointment, the humor of bitterness, and the humor of ‘whistling in the dark’. A ‘can do attitude’ was, at that time, based more on ‘because it just has to be done’, than the more common ‘because I can’ I bring to my days now. It is a pleasant change to be here, now. I look forward to things because they will be worth experiencing, or attaining, or simply because they are ahead of me, rather than with a dreadful certainty that ‘the fantasy is better than the reality’.
Then there’s Spring.
Lovely Blossoms
As beautiful up close as from afar.
Cherry blossoms? Maybe, or some other fruit tree. A spring favorite.
Yesterday, most of my meetings were held beneath the graceful branches of flowering trees.
I’m rarely too rushed, these days, to pause for flowers.
This morning, what else really needs to be said? Insufficient sleep, but what I got was good. The remains of a short work week still facing me, and so little drama at work that all I am is eager to swat the alarm clock Friday morning and head to the coast for a weekend of meditating, writing, sketching, and taking pictures; without even a hint of reluctance to take on the work days between me and the coast.
It’s Spring. Love is. Today is a good day.
…Do you wonder?
This morning I’m musing about ‘certainty’ and ‘being right’ and ‘knowing’. I can remember a time when the lynch-pin holding my understanding of the world together was a sense of certainty, a willingness to ascribe immutability to some characteristic or another, or render some past event ‘precise’ or ‘exact’ with a level of reliability that I no longer think I can accept as a given. I needed, then, to be utterly able to ‘defend my point’ and sway others to ‘my side’. It gave me a powerful boost to ‘win’ arguments. I’m not so sure of things now. Â I’m wrong too much. lol I let go of ‘being right. Doing so is a comfortable fit for where I am in life, and since I feel pretty good most of the time, and pretty calm, I’m willing to have it be what it seems now, and let it go there. Uncertainty is okay with me. Relativity seems alright, too. Perspective has a tendency to clear things up in time, with consideration, and a sense of wonder, and doesn’t piss as many people off, or distance them.
I don’t need to be ‘right’.
Interestingly, that ‘need’ to ‘be right’ has been a big driver of lifelong discontent, dissatisfaction, resentment, anger, hostility, and frustration, as well as a whole host of associated unpleasant behavior that wasn’t any less unpleasant, or any more tolerable or acceptable, because I didn’t actually understand how unacceptable or unpleasant those behaviors were. What we understand, as individuals, doesn’t change the world around us, doesn’t change ‘the facts’ of reality itself. What we understand colors our own experience, changes what we recognize our choices to be, gives us context in which to define our behavior, words with which to describe our experience, but does not change the reality of it. What we understand changes what we think about who we are, but it doesn’t change the experience others have with us. Â The whole notion of ‘being right’ is a sort of ‘us vs. them’ scenario we play out in our heads, generally to regain control or enforce boundaries, set limits, or force another person to conform to our understanding of things, for our own security or personal gain.
I gave up on being right awhile ago. It’s not that I’m ‘always wrong’, or that errors in thinking or decision-making plague me more than others. My perspective on this is more that being right is entirely irrelevant to contentment, joy, love… beautiful experiences to have or to share. An urgent need to ‘be right’ can throw a bucket of icy water on a lot of loving and warm circumstances. I’ve found that where ‘right’ is relevant at all, whether someone else recognizes that I am ‘right’ is utterly irrelevant to my own experience, or ‘the true truth’ or the facts or reality of …whatever. Seriously. I was able to entirely give up on feeding a need to be right – because it frankly doesn’t actually matter even a little bit. I laughed with delight and wide-eyed wonder when I realized it.
Illumination
These days, the only time I press even a bit if I sense I am ‘right’ about something and in disagreement with someone else is when I see legitimate potential for bodily harm, or an obvious safety hazard. The rest of the time? Yeah – if you’re sure you’re right, go ahead and enjoy that. I’ve no need to argue the point, and your perspective differing from mine has no effect on me whatsoever. Arguing never made me feel happy, or gave me any pleasure, although it sometimes provided me a connection to another person that was based on emotional content; how sad when we seek and find our emotional connections through confrontation, instead of intimacy.
A trick of the light…
It gets sticky here, though… because letting go of being right is something I think I am right about! What a delightful joke on me. But, just as a trick of the light doesn’t actually alter the thing I see, even this bit of paradox doesn’t actually alter my experience; being right has let me down many times. Discovering that it doesn’t actually matter to me whether I am right or not, and that ‘being right’ is one of the least valuable or relevant details of any experience, has been eye-opening, and allowed me to learn/grow more and faster. I guess it makes some basic sense – what we ‘know’ impedes learning what we don’t know, because learning something requires that we accept that we lack knowledge.
Today is a good day to be a student. Today is a good day to change the world.
