Sometimes I feel like saying stuff that is not easily understood by many folks, and yet it might matter, so….
I look around at the piles of notes on scraps of paper on every horizontal surface in my office and I think, “I must get through this stuff, put it in a filing cabinet, or blog it and get the place tidied up. Then I remind myself that the paper is not sitting there inertly. It is today’s paper. Yesterday’s paper did get handled. How did this stuff sneak up on me?
Have recently been introduced to a new perspective on life. A perspective that isn’t about ‘accepting a new piece of info’ but about feeling the context for what I might call ‘living my own life.’ I feel it resonate deep inside myself.
It’s a difficult task, remembering the short time in my early life when it was all about experiencing the moment, ‘living true to oneself.’ Yeah, there was a time we all lived joyously, loving our lives, doing what was ‘natural’ for children. This was before someone in our society brought out the ‘rules of life’ that we had to learn to follow, in order to be ‘successful.’ (However, it was mostly about toeing the line, right?)
It was like living a submissive life on one hand and having a shadow or parallel life on the other, filled with how I wished I could live, and they were always in conflict. I guess the most important thing I have seen and learned is that I only vaguely remember the shadow side or simply – ‘I don’t know for sure what my true self is about.’
Don’t know what? Well, a lot that doesn’t matter and much that does or might, if I can just get a handle on it.
Is that why I am constantly writing bits of info, insights or gems I hear others share? Is that the work of my shadow side, wanting to step into the light of myself as my true character?
One side is living a life of rules for accumulating material stuff, rules that others have chosen for me, and the other is trying to feed me the insights that my soul is requesting, in order to fully express itself.
It is very much like something else is living my life through me, something that I was forced to become subservient to. Now, I’m not saying that a large part of it, even if that is the case, a large part of my life looks pretty good to me….but way down deep in the trenches, when push comes to shove, it feels like I have only partial control of the direction I would dearly love to go in life.
We all enter life with a seed that contains a special, individual essence or gift. The life contained in that seed is our true nature and it is so very much alive in the first few years of our lives. It is not a ‘thing’ but yet is something that we must share with our immediate family, community, and perhaps the world. It is that essence that gets set aside when we are being ‘trained’ to be a part of our society….we are being trained to be useful to the needs of commerce, and that is the sad part of the process.
Where am I going with this little essay? Perhaps it is getting to be the correct timing to look at the woes of the world and see whether we have been or are being true players or just the game pieces belonging to someone else. In a world that suggests….nay, insists…. that who we are is dependent on what we HAVE, could we look at the world as our scorecard and see what results we have produced so far, in this crazy game of measuring our worth by what we have accumulated?
It is important to notice what is missing in life, in order to make any corrections in direction. I look at it this way…..at the end of the day, when the monthly mortgage has been paid, all the bills are handled, when we have settled our nerves after another day on the treadmill, when the children are taken care of……and you add the rest…..where was the opportunity to share our own special and precious gift…..the one that keeps pestering our soul for its true expression?
We get to experience bits and pieces of it, and life is moving by. How can we summon the courage and strength to discover what we truly love, that which we wish we could spend our lives doing? That’s the beginning. Once discovered, then what? That ‘then what’ part is the step that really matters.
Rich