I don’t know about you but I have a habit of holding onto many things. This includes matching the year, places and people, yet to unfold, with presumptions or with a view of how it should be.
Lately I have been unliking the words ‘goals,’ ‘productivity,’ and ‘ambitions,’ because I feel that they do not fully represent the experience in entirety, when really, our lives come down to living day by day and moment by moment.
To presume that my year will unfold without any hiccups or incidents, or that this is the year where I finally get to a seemingly anticipated goal, comes from both hope and fear.
With hope that in my humanly body, combined with courage, I will be using my precious life for all the things that serve both myself and others.
With fear that if I don’t grasp onto the precious life with full productivity, of reaching an ambition, I will be wasting it, or worse yet, the grand schemer themselves will be taking it away from me and handing it over to someone else who is truly worthy.
Both hope and fear then becomes one thing - the inability to ease into the state of impermanence of the things to unfold. Recently, I heard a Buddhist nun describe impermanence with the word ‘groundlessness’…to have no ground beneath us or to have the ground shifting in position like the earth’s tectonic plates. In this way, we are standing on a ground that is literally shifting!
Whilst the Earth’s movements seem minuscule enough everyday to even notice, the unfolding of our lives may have a different rhythm and tone each year.
Some of the shifts in our lives that lead us to experience the groundlessness may begin and end with a bang.
Some shifts start off as a quiet, slow hum that eventually gets louder and louder and quickens in pace to a state where we seemingly have no grounding.
It is not always easy to let go of our goals, productivity or ambitions. To un-do and untie these knots are harder than making the knots and scheming the plots in the first place. If you don’t believe me, try to untangle a flimsy silver necklace chain that has become knotted, due to mis-keeping over several years!
Because knots and schemes can be endless but to let go is infinite.
And even if we do not make goals, it is in our human nature to live with some sense of anticipation for what is to come between us here and the meeting with our desires and longings.
The irony is, if we are ever to self actualise or to find a deeper sense of openness as an experience itself, rather than intellectualising it, we must try to be ok with the ground shifting and changing beneath us.
In moments where there is uncertainty for the future, we must try to be ok with having no ground.
As well as in moments where we fall into the darkest parts of ourselves, when we are anxious or insecure.
In that instability, life hits us with the reality of what truly is unfolding and is present in front of us than the formulas and codes we are deciphering in our minds.
In the poem I wrote about my holding on tight to the feelings I’ve known before but the season is already unfolding. I did hold on to particular successes of last year and to my self development of how far I have come, with my own story of how the following months will unfold as a result of that.
But just as the flowers in the poem that obviously tell me so, I experienced over the past couple of weeks, hints of what life is requiring of me in the year to come. It is within the spaces I did not anticipate to occupy or occupy once again and with attention to the people I did not assume to give or give again.
Such is the irony.
If we hold onto our original intentions, it may show our stubbornness or our integrity, whichever way we choose to look at it. But we, in our daily lives, will begin to suffer with resistance if we cannot accept the changing of our seasons or ignore the hints along the way.
If we dare to face what is really in front of us, we will see there are already whispers leading us to the directions we can be walking in now. Not in the years to come, but in this year, on this day.
It may show us through the worries expressed by a loved one or a colleague, who needs our help. It may show us by a particular situation we find ourselves in.
And if we dare, to stay open enough for that groundlessness, moving deeper into the unexpected territories, without wanting the same learnings or the same challenges, we may realise that the season we find ourselves in is exactly the one which is meant to be for us, and the one to which allows the qualities already innate within us to develop and blossom.
So I dare you and I dare myself…
To listen to the whispers and the hints, to really see in front of you, the change in the season we find ourselves in.
To be ok with the shifting ground of the reality that requires us to lean it.
To, as one of my favourite poets David Whyte would say, “go against” ourselves in order to meet the season, with whatever is required of us.
Part of the truth is, perhaps, we may learn one thing throughout the whole seasons of the year and not several. In our consumerist society, the society that drives us to the ever more and not less, it may seem like that will not be enough. Opening into that one thing, however, may allow us to reach into the depths we wish to experience.
Much love,
From a person who has a brain like yours that can forever be in a world of ideas for days, but one who is trying to step into experiences that will shock the brain.
Contemplation
:
How are the seasons shifting slightly differently this year to the one before?
Who or what in your life is revealing to you what lies in reality in front of you- that requires you to really show up?
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