eThoughts : Endings and Forevers

Maybe I’ve read one too many books or watched one too many movies, but it seems to me we’re conditioned to focus our energy and our lives on the importance of endings or forevers. Yet, I think between endings and forevers is our life.

Think about it—we want to live happily ever after, we don’t want to die. Love should last forever, but not pain. Friends should remain and enemies go. Health should blossom, illness wither. We embrace youth and rail at old age. We want money, whether we work or not, and we don’t like the feeling of not enough. Cars shouldn’t break, warranties should last. Heaven forever is good, hell forever is bad. For that matter, anything good should last and anything bad should end.

But our lives are still largely lived between endings and forevers.

The point I once again think I’m trying to make is that our lives go by while we are watching out for what could end and what will last. There’s a rule in the work world that I think applies: Keep your eye on the ball that’s pitched, not on the one that may be pitched. It’s difficult to do a good job if all you’re doing is aimed at getting another position, or in going home or waiting for your weekend or retiring. Understand that if no ball is pitched, you can, and perhaps should, speculate about what’s coming or evaluate what has been. But when the pitch is a reality, futures and pasts are not—seeing the ball that is coming is the only attention that works. And no need to worry, if the pitch is something you’ve seen before and you succeeded in hitting it, your conditioning will kick in from your seeing the ball correctly. If you weren’t previously successful and your evaluation was right on, you’ll see what to do. If it isn’t a pitch you’ve ever seen, your seeing will still serve to guide you. Clearly, the best action comes from the best seeing.

The problem with most of our lives is that a pitch is not always obvious, until we get beaned. Well, maybe not even then. For the most part it seems that the delineation between a pitch and speculation is way fuzzy.

Commensurate with the previous post, being in sync with the appropriate energy is once again coming down the pipe. But, rather than letting this pancake out of control, let’s stick to whether the pitch is about forevers or whether it’s about endings. That’s easier—mostly neither one is the pitch, even if those two entities are used as leverage on an almost daily basis. After all, the threat or benefit of a forever or an ending is a powerful carrot.

Well, what we want can be fine. What we’ve had can also be important to remember. However, what we’ve got is likely not about forevers or about endings—it’s likely about the gift of now. And that’s the place where we can relax about what was or what will be and embrace what is. I mean, have you ever noticed how much more fun you can have when you aren’t fighting with or holding on to pasts and futures? However narrow such moments are, and at the risk of sounding like the delusional Barney the Dinosaur, there’s almost always time for something light.