This week, as I sat out on my porch, watching the last days of spring roll past, the mulberries ripening and the pears growing strong, I was struck by an interesting thought…
What is the point of all this thinking?
Mind says that it is to solve all the problems in my world, to bring me to a place of safety and peace and joy, yet all the thinking seems to create more of the opposite, more stress and fear and anxiety.
Mind says that it is necessary, that otherwise something terrible will happen, and yet it continues even when everything is perfectly fine.
And so I started thinking (see I just can’t stop) that maybe all that storytelling has a different function. I started to wonder what it protects us from.
Maybe those stories allow us to skate across the surface of our present moment experience, safe from the worries that lurk in the depths.
Am I using my life well? What will happen next? What will happen when I die?
This thing called living is riddled with uncertainty…and I can certainly feel discomfort down deep inside when I open up to this reality…can you?
Add to this the many emotional experiences that we have not fully digested and which live on inside our bodies and it is no wonder that we might choose to stay on the surface of experience.
The question is whether this truly serves us, whether avoiding discomfort is worth the price of losing your moment to moment life.
Because a life lost in story loops is rather shallow. It is abstract and vague and stressful.
What is the alternative? To be willing to feel. To feel what? Well…everything. Everything that is here now has a place at the table. Everything that is here now is welcome.
Could we breathe together a moment and extend this invitation to the pain that lives inside? To our wounded and shattered hearts?
I hope that today we might.