eThoughts : Clutter, Part II

We saw each other at that moment—a moment without agenda. It was strange as it had always seemed that to connect required some agenda or the other, whether it was biological, environmental, spiritual, emotional, cognitive, social, individual, whatever. There was vastness in her being. There was vastness in mine. Yet in that vastness was something like a home, something very familiar, warm, cozy, full of love and wonder.

And then we noticed.

The Future

What will become of us, how will we die, what happens then, if anything? What anxiety the future holds, short of prediction and control, both of which we have in short supply, even if we think we have prediction and control well stored.

Funny how much of the future is so much related to the past. But even if we could separate the past from the future, the future would still be a warehouse of our inventory.

Plans, goals, desires, needs, outcomes. What exactly is a life without those things? What would we have to say sans all those jangling chains?

What if we have children to perpetuate our goals, our desires, our need to survive regardless of our impending death? What sort of evolved beings are we if we know we’re not enough, so we throw our progeny into the landscape of our inabilities?

It’s a New Year and a good time to remove the clutter from another area of our warehouse: Our future—as in we don’t have one. Not even death.

Whoa, says you—what sort of bad herb have I been ingesting? Death is not in our future? Everybody knows better than that—talk about loss of contact with reality.

Okay, that’s what this New Year’s musing is about, losing our sense of reality, the one that has been crushing us with past patterns and future desires.

Again, don’t get me wrong: Patterns are and desires can be sooo much fun. It’s the crushing part I’m thinking we don’t need. Everybody knows that as well.

We long for redemption as though it is outside of us, located some place other than where we reside or in someone that is not of our nature. What a conundrum. We are dogs that need to be cats or vice versa? What if redemption was not somewhere in the future, but right here in our present moment, in our Now? Always was and always will be if for no other reason than time is an illusion, a tool we use in organizing our lives. Yet that organization has become our litmus test for the veracity and efficacy of our existence. We’ve developed an affinity for what isn’t ours and lost what is in the process.

There was never a need for redemption until we created it. It gave us something to do—a future, a feeling of continuance we did not see we had anyway. We have created a game that has the better of us, yet was designed for us to win by remembering it was a game.

Let’s lose that bit of clutter. We get to keep the future to play in, but the present to live in. Of course, when we know that, then play is everywhere, anyway.

So folks, let’s greet each other this year without those future patterns as well. Let’s be present. From there we can do anything and a whole lot better than we’ve been doing.

So many gifts!

We had always been, she and I, though it was not necessarily her or I—or her and I. It was simply that we noticed.

What seemed breathtaking was really breath-giving. And so we did what seemed like loss and seemed like gain and we never stopped, if for no other reason than life never stops. It only requires that we notice.