eThoughts : Life in the Way of Living: Is Life an Intrusion Upon Our Sacred Space?

Sometimes my being is assaulted by all of the things in life that “should” not be the way it is. My reaction seems to be based on the premise that if these anomalies were corrected, the environment would be so much more supportive and it would be easier to learn what there really is to learn, rather than learning how to ignore the crap or how to fix it. There is enough work to do just properly keeping up with our possession stewardship—throwing in an additional responsibility like upping the level of our awareness to notice what we’ve chosen to ignore, can be like going to the well once too often.

What if nagging possessions and next-levels-of-awareness were not robbers, but bearers of gifts? Why do we see so many things as nagging at our attention when we might just as well see that nagging as appropriate information? Do we really think our car or our carpet, our canine or our cognition, were self sufficient? Co-dependency is not just a dirty term.

Maybe we can take a lesson from surfers—things come in waves and one tries to accurately predict the high and low points as well as the energy the wave is exerting and in which direction for how long. The particular points on the wave are nothing more than pixels that fill in our clarity to appropriately describe, locate, predict, and relate to movement. The number of markers we have, has a lot to do with the accuracy of our image, though we can become so obsessively intent on marking points on a wave that we lose sight of our original intention—to surf.

In any case, as the saying goes, life is what happens to us while we’re busy making plans. That’s not completely accurate, but it expresses a real pixel that mirrors our reality. When we resent what we consider intrusions, we might be doing nothing more than expressing our frustration and that frustration may be nothing more than us not getting what we imagined. A legitimate frustration—yes. The alpha dog pulling us where it wants—why?

Our notion of making our lives better is linked to our imagination—our ability to see a better time. Our notion of being thwarted at living in better times can be linked to our frustration. We can never entirely live the way we imagine, imagination is not about how things are, but what can be—or could have been—but we can recognize that whether things go as we imagined or not as we imagined at all, it is all food for the imagination, as well as for the actual manifestation. After all, think how many times we thought everything was going as planned and then we found out it was a bad plan. Guess how that happened?

So, the role of resentment is what actually—a steam relief valve that announces just how much it takes to bring us to a boil? That’s interesting feedback. Given a lot of the pathetic stewardship of human identity and human impact, perhaps we might want to lose some of that resentment, rest a bit, do what we can, and remember to use guilt constructively—as in doing the best we can and then fixing it if we can or accept it if we have to, for whatever length of time in whatever type of space.

There’s a rub, have we done the best we can? Crap, now there’s more stuff to do, just when it was time to sit down and do nothing. I think I’ll do nothing for a bit and get back to all the things nagging at me later. After all, I did put in some effort trying to articulate the conundrum—that feels like it helps.

Pontius Pilate had a point, though I don’t know if he used that point appropriately. But that’s a thought for another time.