I wrote this, for my friend and colleague Christy, two and half years ago. But it's perfect also for my friend and colleague Pamela, who I'm remembering today.
--
Sometimes, in the midst of all our striving, longing, and reaching, our building of towers and the making of names for ourselves, it’s important to remember that one day we will, with certainty, lose it all.Some of this will happen piece by piece. We’ll gradually say goodbye to people as they leave life. We’ll realise, perhaps suddenly, that their presence in the world touched our hearts and lit up our eyes. We’ll find out that their worth is beyond words.And for all of us, the loss will also come entirely at once – maybe at a time when we least expect it, before we can even know it’s happening – when it is ‘I’ who is leaving and it is others who have to say goodbye.Some of us take a long time to find all this out, holding our inner gifts back from the world until we’re sure the time is just right – a time that may never come.But others seem to live with this understanding so fully in their hearts it’s as if nothing is withheld. They’ve discovered that the point of life is life itself, and that each of us is simply another expression of life’s beauty and wonder. And from this understanding flows their kindness, their generosity and their wisdom, so that they shine brighter than the sun.
Photo Credit: Giuseppe Milo (www.pixael.com) via Compfight cc
Behind all our attempts to manipulate and control the world so it's just as we'd like it (and behind the pain, frustration, sorrow and disappointment that our inevitable failure brings), we're just trying to find a way to feel safe and to feel at home. I think we'd be better off knowing this.Then we'd set aside our mission to control what can't be controlled. And we'd work on how to feel safe and at home in the world as it is - in this ever-changing, surprising, vast and mysterious life in which we find ourselves.
Ten factors that are more important than the productivity you're measuring:
How important it is to discover that often it's our very fixation with freedom that most enslaves us.We easily think that we're most free when we can choose whatever we want, whenever we want. Or when we're free of binding, lasting ties (anything we can't get out of when we choose).But one of the defining qualities of our humanity is our capacity to care, deeply, about things. Care always implies commitment, and always implies dedication. How much can we say we care about anything or anyone if we can leave them behind when the whim takes us?It's a paradox, for sure. Our freedom to be completely free holds us back from dedicating ourselves. And the very act of narrowing our options, of choosing what we'll commit to and what we won't, opens up the widest freedom to participate in the life that's in front of us.
Three basic human fears about what we do:
You're standing for the first time on the edge of a platform above a wide and deep canyon, harnessed, checked and secured to a zip wire that descends at a steep angle towards the forest floor below. Many people have gone before you. And yet you hesitate at the edge, feeling both the way this possibility calls to you, and the way it frightens you.Can you distinguish your anxiety at this moment from your fear? They're different, in important ways.Fear is related to the threat to your safety, real or imagined. I'll die here. The harness will undo. I'll fall. I'll go too fast. I won't slow down in time. Something will go wrong. I'll never be able to get back again.Anxiety is related to your freedom to step into this possibility or to step back, and your knowledge that the choice is yours alone. I want to do this, but I don't. I've never done this before. I won't know how to feel. I won't know how to be with what I do feel. I won't be able to deal with how unfamiliar this is going to be, with being changed by the experience. I won't know how to be with others when I'm done. I won't know how to be myself. Every developmental opportunity in our lives is like this, when we find ourselves standing on the brink of a new opening, a deep, broad vista stretched out before us that we suspect will change us. And while fear can sometimes be addressed with competent support - someone who can show us the equipment, explain how everything works, point out the successful descents that came before, and give us the statistics - anxiety cannot be resolved in this way, because anxiety is to do with what it is to become the one who leaps.And when we want to travel the wire, or start to see that we simply must do so, what we need most is not people who'll push us over the edge, nor people who'll try to pull us back to the familiar world that is no longer serving us, but those who'll stay with us a while, peer with us into the opening, and explore what we see with compassion, curiosity and wonder until we're ready to do the work for ourselves that nobody else can do.
Anxiety is different from fear, in that fear is always in some way about me - my safety, my circumstances.Fear comes and goes, but anxiety is nearly always with us. It isn't personal. It comes from our very human capacity to choose, and from our ability to invent possible futures without knowing how they'll work out. As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard tells us, anxiety is the dizzying effect of our freedom, and the consequence of the boundlessness of our horizons.When we deal with anxiety by trying to run from it, or by trying to numb it, or when we let ourselves be overcome by it (so that the anxious part of us is the only part that's speaking), one of the consequences is disconnection from ourselves and from the possibilities that are calling. But when we treat it as a messenger we discover that anxiety is here to show us something we've been asleep to, something we've been avoiding, some way we're holding on tight to that which ultimately cannot be held onto.The difficult part, often, is knowing precisely what it is we're avoiding, asleep to, or holding on to so tightly. And this is where we can often be helped so much by others who love us but who won't rescue us. People who, instead of sending us back to sleep, will stand alongside us with compassion, truth, hope, and light as we discover what new way of being alive the anxiety, from which we so want to run, is calling us towards.
As