Conduits

This is a 'what if' story.

What if all the people and events of your life were arriving with a gift for you in their hands? Not appearing for a 'reason' so much as to offer greater insight into something important, critical even. Maybe people arrive, especially the ones that pull at us most deeply in beautiful and painful ways, to conjure up some feeling or experience so that we can become more human. So that we can activate or deepen our compassion because we have tapped into something more essential than our own story. If we choose it, each and every angry, sad, joyful and shameful moment, lived fully, can be an opportunity to break out of the bounded prison of the self. Even a good venting session can be fertile ground for transcendence, if we treat ourselves with a kind of radical compassion.

Writing teaches me this. It is a way of processing and expressing things, it is an outlet I allow myself, an occasionally public but somehow safe place for me. I am aware that most often my topics take on a life of their own. When I sit down at the keyboard to 'write down the bones' of whatever emotional filament is running through my life at the moment, it always seems that the object fades into the background. Whatever feeling or idea inspires me to start writing, quickly becomes secondary, a conduit helping me see that there is a gift in the experience of feeling something deeply. The things that I care most about, tighten or open my chest and irk me the most are the emotional grist for the mill. Powerful stuff. As I write, or most often when I am done, I look back and understand that I was not writing about specifics; it may have started that way, but then crossed into more universal terrain. It's like in a dream where the people and places change and shapeshift - my house becomes a cave, my father is suddenly someone else - a wolf, a stranger, a friend, I can fly without wings, breathe underwater, or commune with whales. It is a place where things change form easily, and without effort or distress. Anger becomes strength, pain becomes clarity, shame becomes compassion. Real life can be like that too.

We get to choose what to do with the stuff and stories that comes into our lives. We can cast it aside, reduce it to meaningless reductionist pieces if we like. Label the people and events in some way as meant or not meant to be, attach meanings that are convenient or easy in order to close a chapter; a one true love; a nemesis or persecutor; tragic, beautiful or broken. This gives us control and something to cling to. Or we can hold it close, but not still, and allow and observe as it transmutes, fades, or grows into a greater version of itself. Held lightly, great insight can inhabit these moments of permutation.

I think I can see this truth, even in the throes of turmoil and resistance. It's not about being perfect, and actually it might be the opposite. The more I embrace the ugly bits, the more they dissolve. I am aware that I am living through experience, not for the sake of it, and some things are not what they appear. I have been stuck and I will get stuck again, but I am not at the mercy of what transpires, nor am I in control of it. But I do get to decide what to do with what arrives at my doorstep. Allow myself to pick it up, turn it over as many times as needed, and notice how it gets sifted, mixed and reformed through the mill of my consciousness for future use. In my own time and in my own way. Or I can turn away from what is painful and step over it as one would a pothole or bit of roadkill, in a hurry to leave it behind and continue on the planned route. Letting this precious gift get trampled and ground to dust, lost forever.