Slogging Through Mud

Just what I needed; one more thing to deal with today!” My friend’s phrase “one more thing” rang of years of frustration and got me thinking of one of mine, "slogging through mud." Suddenly I realized it was the analogy of my life. More than analogy, it was my life.

I was raised in Ohio where mud is a neutral brown clay that clings heavily to your boots and slows you down. Slogging through mud makes you very tired. Every day when dealing with the "maintenance" side of life, it’s as though I am slogging through mud. Even just picturing my day with patches of "mud" between me and my goals makes me tired.

Mental mud can be any task I think I have to complete before I get to do what I want. Mud shows up as appointments on my calendar, incomplete projects or anything I have to do first. Even fun things like lunch dates with friends can become mud, if they come between me and my goals. After slogging through mud all day, it’s no wonder I need a nap!

Once I got just how real mud was in my life, I started noticing it in the moment and saying what i saw to myself: “You think showering is mud. So is making orange juice. Eating breakfast is mud. Piles of mail, more mud…”

After a while I just started to laugh because it was so true! If I wanted to get some work done, laundry was mud; if I wanted to get the laundry done, work was mud. Like my friend, there was always one more thing in the way. I even had a saying for it: “We don’t do what’s important, we just do what’s next.” And I wondered why it was so challenging to live in appreciation. Of course it was hard; I was trying to appreciate being held back!

As a reminder, I filled a jar with mud from the garden and sat it on my desk for comparison, “Mail / mud. Phone call / mud. Lunch / mud…” It helped to be able to tell the difference; but until I realized I didn’t see a difference, I couldn’t have said it.

Then it hit me. There was grace hidden in the analogy. Since I worked at home, everything in my day actually had the same priority. It was all the same except for what I wanted – my goals – and it was up to me to say. The mud story saved me from ever having to say what I wanted. (Refer to post 6/13/08 "Wanting Something.")

When I understood how it worked, the analogy’s hold on me was gone! I now say what I want, do it, and while I’m doing it, it remains what I want to do. For the first time since my childhood, my days are free of mud.

Everything Is Perfect As It Is (Secular Spirituality)

"Everything is perfect as it is." Rather than a statement of complacency, this is a highly motivational line of inquiry. In order for you to manifest perfection in anything, you must see it first. Thus is the nature of any singularity.

Unlike things, actions and concepts that exist as contrasting dualities (i.e. good/bad, light/dark), singularities have characteristics heretofore assigned only to deity: they are unchanging, they have no beginning and no end, or as I prefer say it, they have no on and off switches, they always just are (i.e. energy). Singularities are the truth.

Once you accept as your own the declaration, “Everything is perfect as it is,” you begin the inquiry, “Given that everything is perfect, where is the perfection in ___?” Growing up as a perfectionist or more accurately, an “imperfectionist,” I can point out the imperfection in anything, until I consciously invoke my declaration. As unlikely as it seems, everything into which I have inquired has revealed perfection at some level. The trick is finding the right point of view.

Most of the time, I find perfection from the point of view of logic. Looking at the way imperfection shows up is one example. Looking for perfection in “seeing imperfection” reveals how we work. Somewhere we pick up and accept as our own the declaration, “Perfect is an ideal, therefore, nothing on earth can be perfect.” Once accepted, we start seeing proof of imperfection everywhere until the declaration becomes a belief.

Look around. If you are an imperfectionist like me, you will see imperfection in everything, and if you can see any imperfection at all, you will label the whole thing imperfect. Life in an imperfect world can be very frustrating and lead to resignation and complacency–no matter what you do, it’s still not perfect.

So where is the perfection in that? The perfection of “seeing imperfection” is that it works. Once we understand how something works, we can apply that methodology successfully to other things. When we apply the declaration-proof-belief cycle to the opposite idea of “seeing perfection,” the same is true: you can see perfection in everything, and if you can see any perfection at all, you can label the whole thing perfect. Life in a perfect world is inspiring and full of possibilities–when you understand how something works, it’s easy to bring out its perfection. For example, instead of giving up over the imperfection of a political system, seeing the perfection of how it works inspires us to take action to change and improve it until the task is complete.

The declaration, “Everything is perfect as it is,” and the supporting declaration, “Everything we do works,” are statements of singularities. These are truths from which we can create a world to match.

Wanting Something

I recently realized I have this belief about wanting things that has me feeling trapped. I remember being taken to the toy store as a young child and my dad telling me I could have any ONE thing in the store that I wanted. I suspect he was trying to empower me. Trouble was, he didn't know I already was. I had no issue with that until I chose the biggest thing in the store, a surrey (a kind of peddle-driven golf cart), and saw his reaction to my choice. He laughed and said, "Well, I did say anything!" and bought it for me anyway. At that moment, I believed I had made him (the god of my world) do something he didn't want to do by simply wanting something. Whoa! Too much responsibility for a kid.

So here’s how this belief (or programming) that I put into place as a child shows up in my life. If I want money, I have to do things I don't want to do like work; if I want a body I have to do things I don't want to do like eat; if I want a clean house I have to do things I don't want to do like vacuum and dust; if I want to share my knowledge about parenting, I have to do things I don't want to do like write a book... Never mind I actually like doing all those things, except when I "have to."

You might know this feeling. I want to do something like write, but somehow when I get to do it, suddenly catching up on email or even doing weeding looks like what I want to do instead. What I want keeps slipping around on me like that unless I just make myself do something (in keeping with my belief). It seems all my wants in the world of thoughts and emotions create "not wants" in the world of doing. Catch 22. The way out has been to NOT want anything, so I don't “have to” do anything I don't want to do, plus no disappointment!

Maybe allowing myself to be right is what I need to do for a while. Just go ahead and do things I don't want to do and keep not wanting to do them instead of trying to tell myself, "Well, you said you wanted to, and now you don't. You ungrateful thing!" I know that when I start something, I don't want to stop. The story must just come up at the point of change. Oh! No wonder I hate interruptions. It starts the cycle all over again and I have to make myself do something I don't want to do to again until I get lost in it.

The thoughts keep coming. Money, wanting, disappointment, appreciation, change, interruption...all my big ones rolled into one. Talking or writing about it certainly helps.

So now, I want to write. But boy, finished laundry and a clean house are sure starting to look good. Rats, I need to eat, too. OK, let me try not resisting. I'll just SAY WHAT I SEE myself feeling: "You don't want to write, you don't want to write, you don't want to write..."

Hmmm. Not bad. We'll see where this takes me.

Where good comes from

As the only beings on the planet who distinguish good and bad, we are the only deliberate creators of good.

Time

I've been having some thoughts about time. When I first learned about time as a kid, I didn't like it. I've never liked it. It was a way to be late and not get to do what I wanted to do--never enough time. I never could understand why my mom would say, “You can't go to your friend's house because you will only have an hour to play.” An hour! I could do so much in an hour. With a friend, it was forever. So was five minutes, for that matter! Adults made an hour sound short, but time with a friend was all the same to me--great!

Then, I remember one evening when I was fully immersed in solving some math problem and enjoying myself thoroughly in my little condoned escape from the world (homework), my dad came up and said, "You know, you won't always have all the time you want to finish your math." Although I know he was trying to help me learn to use time wisely and save me from disappointment, I was crushed. To me it was the final evidence that time was bad and wrong, but real. I've fought against it ever since. After that moment, there was never enough time.

I'm a very visual person, so basically, real time looked like a conveyor belt with time-line markings and all things and experiences on it coming from some invisible point and dropping off the end into an abyss of irretrievability--a moving line with unknowable infinity at each end. With the time-line as my "reality," I envisioned "now" as just standing at one point and watching life zip by--sometimes slower and sometimes faster. To keep anything, you had to have a really good memory or grab material things off of the moving time-line and keep them; once they were gone, they were gone. Since time remained linear and moving, "now" was pretty tiny, almost indistinguishable. I hated time. I wished everything would just stop.

Here's how this belief showed up in my life: I am a collection preservation professional, I document everything (even my thoughts, ahem), our house looks like a warehouse, I need to organize things to avoid losing them, I don't deal with loss well, the passing of time is very sad to me, as a kid I hated history class...

You can see how the Eastern idea of an infinite "now" might be nice, but completely incomprehensible in my time-line model. My "now" was an arbitrary, tiny point from which to view the time-line rolling by. It was so tiny that by the time I thought the word "now," it was gone. Nothing was concrete about "now" at all. It didn't even belong on the time-line since it didn't move. "Now" was out of place and time. Of course I could still get a picture of it in my imagination, but since "now" was not on the time-line and everything had to be, it really didn't make sense. So although I lived like my time-line was real, I never understood time. Never did, never would...or so I thought.

I’ve been noticing this thing about complaints lately: they all seem to communicate wishes. For example, “I can’t talk to people easily,” means “I wish I could.” So I applied it to my complaint about time: "I don't understand time," meant "I wish I did understand time." Seeing it that way started to remove the frustration from it, and suddenly I was able to simply see my complaint from another point of view. It had become a simple fact, "I don't understand time." I’ve been right all along! (Shifting complaints to wishes then reinterpreting them as facts is a great way to begin to un-stick a stuck belief.) A whole new world opened up when I got I was right, which supports my contention that all growth is through acceptance.

So now I'm right; I don't know what time is. That means it can be anything again, like it was before I decided what it "really" was as a kid based on my parents' comments. What if instead of a time-line, time really was "now"...a huge and infinite now...that you could access at any moment with all of your senses. What if you could just stop what you were doing or notice what you were doing and “be.” Surprise, it’s true! You always can, because it is always now!

The only reason we think one "now” on the time-line is different than another "now" is because by the virtue of our memory, we can tell one "now" from another. Voila, the the ability to see things as separate extends into time for humans, but not for rocks. They are a conglomerate of matter without memory, while we are a conglomerate of matter with memory. We can tell one moment from another and string thoughts and actions together in a linear fashion to change and even control what is in front of us "now" and "now" and "now." Rocks can't. While for us both, the whole experience of "now" is the same (being not doing), unlike rocks we get to "do" because of this rare thing that separates life from not-life--memory (from the simplest level of cellular memory, DNA, that allows reproduction, to the complex level of memory found in the human brain).

Because we have memory cells, we separate "nows," store them up and drop breadcrumbs in our brain to find our way back, and then project future "nows" based on stored ones. By separating and identifying "nows," we can sequence them and repeat them, learn from them and vary them, so that when we open our eyes after every blink, we find what appear to be new "nows" to experience. By remembering what came before and projecting what could come after, we can make physical differences in the environment in which we experience our “now.”

This way of looking at time, whatever time is, is all good. You can be in the "now" whenever you want as your natural default state because it's always here. Then you can take action in time and space in a linear fashion to change the next "now" for yourself. Memory is a gift of DNA, the ability to repeat and learn is a gift of memory, time-lines are a gift and a tool to use or set aside depending on your desires. To experience a moment fully, remove the time-line model and just “be;” to set an appointment, replace the time-line and begin to take steps in the "now" following the breadcrumb trails in your memory to get you there and then. With “now” as the default reality, time makes sense and is no longer wrong. Nice!