I do not live a contemplative life. I wonder what I would have been like as a cloistered nun, a minister, or a therapist. I didn’t arrange my life so that I could focus my time on being sane, centered and spiritually enlightened.
I have filled countless journals with my profound, serene insights, with my enlightened thoughts. I have dreamed of sharing them with the world as many of the serene, enlightened writers I admire have. Something has always stopped me though. Yes, I believe that those insights are my true inner truth, but they’re not the whole truth, not the complete truth of my life. To have people read those thoughts without balancing them with the other side of my experience would be a lie.
My life does not come perfectly preassembled. Sometimes parts break, the wheels fall off and I’m stranded at the side of life’s highway trying to remember how to live as my own Higher Self. I do not come to you as a shiny, flawless product. Flawless new things are beautiful but I don’t know if there’s much to be learned from them.
A gleaming new car on the showroom floor is a wonderful thing to see. I’d like to own it. I’d like to be like it. However, I don’t know if there’s much to be learned from it. I remember that my father once owned a weathered and neglected 1940’s Packard, nothing pretty about it. I recently saw a perfectly restored and maintained Packard from the 1940s. I think it was the most beautiful car I ever saw. A lot of love, attention and knowledge went into making that old car beautiful. It wasn’t in good shape because it had never been used. It had been driven hundreds of thousands of miles. There were countless bumps, dents and breakdowns along the way but every time it fell apart it was put back together with loving attention and mechanical enlightenment.
Most of us, regardless of age, are more like that old car. We need to learn how to maintain ourselves. It’s not that we never fall apart; it’s just that we know how to put ourselves back together again.
I live in a world where the vacuum cleaner doesn’t work, the garbage disposal cracks, the computer crashes at my moment of most profound inspiration. I have beautiful enlightened friends, but the relatives living in the basement went to the Jerry Springer school of conflict resolution.
I want to work tirelessly to save the environment and starving children, but I can’t seem to control the clutter in my own home.
I believe in waking up in the morning, full of wonder at the beauty of simply being alive on earth, but all too often I feel weighed down by the burdens of the day. There are dirty dishes in the sink. I need to take care of the grandkids while my daughter-in-law goes to work. I haven’t kept up with the mail and I’m afraid there might be an important bill or notice that I’m missing. Thousands of emails sit in four accounts and I wonder if some friend or associate has sent me news of a great opportunity. Are they wondering if I’m rejecting their interest in me because I haven’t replied? I need to get to the grocery store and my body craves exercise, a brisk walk around the lake and some work with my weights.
The list goes on and on, but somehow I know that the joy of life doesn’t lie in juggling all of this and keeping it from falling apart. The joy is in the spaces between, the times when I can take a deep breath and appreciate the flowers in the garden, the times when I can light a candle, pick up a pen and write slowly in my leather-bound journal instead of typing as rapidly as possible
I need to get it under control. I need to give my thoughts and plans time to form instead of rushing frantically from one unfinished task to another. Things fall apart. That’s a given. We live in a material world where nothing lasts forever but I’m certain that there’s much more to my life, my soul, and my spirit. I feel my soul truth in the silence. I see it in my grandchildren’s eyes. I need to grab that truth and hold on no matter what else is happening, but it needs to be held gently. It doesn’t respond to force. I need to hold still and let it come to me. That is the challenge.
I feel like there are two of me, the physical person who needs to get things done and the soul that recognizes the importance of inner peace. Sometimes they have trouble meshing. They don’t function together very well. They have fallen apart and I need to put them back together again so that I can live my best life.