Acute ecstasy and chronic agony of existence. The rollercoaster ride of hope and despair. Is this emotional pendulum the balance we are destined for? Are we faced with human nature or human malfunction?
Is the ultimate freedom detachment from the material world, where both pain and joy become one? Somewhere in the depths of our unconscious mind, is that what we are gravitating towards – bringing together the two poles of our existence; merging the many sides into one?
Stillness
Monks train detachment of this kind for years in meditation and frugal living. A system trained by fasting to resist even the most basic bodily urges is well able to discern a minor trigger as an emotional junk food that exists only to distract and temporarily excite your senses, leaving behind a void larger than before.
A stable nervous system and a clear mind respond differently to the world. Less of a reaction, more of a conscious reply. Instead of jumping straight into the worst-case scenario, there is room left to breathe, to scan the horizon, to observe the vastness of the view, and to stretch the corners of your grand perspective.
So why don’t we train ourselves?
Are we unable, unfit, unwilling, or all of it? Perhaps we’re attached to a false lead – an attempt to achieve, through a mind filled with a more clever system of rules, regulations, and beliefs, that which can be done only with a silent mode of the mind?
Arrival
Where would we have been if we weren’t jumping to conclusions? Is every assumption a jump into a pit without a bottom, a reset taking you back to the beginning of the game? Level zero, all progress acquired, now erased.
If we were trained to remain calm, would we already be on this game’s finish line? Would we have risen to a completely different level, a new dimension of existence? From a rollercoaster ride to deep space exploration.
Perhaps the ultimate elevation would be to simply learn how to sit on the ground, inhale with the full capacity of your lungs, and surrender to the osmosis of adventures that live below and above your mind.
The Pattern
Jumping to conclusions is riding the pattern of your deepest wounds. You see not what is, but what once was. You fear not what you think might happen, but what you believe will repeat.
The opposite is a pattern not of a fixed, but an open frame of mind. A blank page for new words to emerge. The pattern that shows how every issue in the past has been matched with its counterpart. Every problem exists for a solution, and with time, they always collide.
The steadiest pattern in our lives is not of looping in the same wounds, but the pattern of a problem being united with a solution.
In the course of your life, you solved more issues than you left behind. It’s just that your eyes focus more on what still needs to be done.
Somehow, things always work out just fine. Even when you don’t know how, fine always finds a way to reach you.
If haste and assumptions are riding the spiral of your wounds, then the slow breath and awareness are journeying upward along the spiral of potential. A potential of every situation being more than what it at first appears; a potential of every person and life being vaster and deeper than what is first revealed.
What am I not seeing at this moment?
What potentials am I leaving unattended?
Impermanence
Assumptions always come with the taste of permanence. “If this happens, I’m doomed.” Yet, reality tells a different story.
Nothing is permanent, both good and bad. Nature responds unanimously, but we still resist.
Why? Why does it cause us so much suffering? Why are we so stubbornly and painfully convinced that things can exist as permanent?
Because under the veil of our daily worries and struggles, our attempts to do everything the right way and to secure and cement life – lie the terror of change.
Mystery
Why is it that we fear nothing more than change?
First, we swim in the notion that life has to work our way. Challenge, struggle, and effort are not concepts that exist in our universe. I want, I deserve – therefore it must be.
Even if that worked, for how long could it last? Wouldn’t we be going around and finding ways to inflict chaos, to turn our steady, predictable, and lukewarm life into something alive, something that pulsates and moves, something that breathes on its own, and takes us on a journey unknown, where both the course and destination are a mystery to our minds?
Gravity
Then comes the play of identity.
We learned that our centre of gravity lies in identity. If someone tries to question it, our ground becomes unstable.
Here, life is not evaluated through the lens of truth and reality but through what better fits the shape of our identity. On hierarchy of values, identity stands above truth and reality.
There is nothing more that change loves than to shake up the foundation of our identity. Therefore, we’d rather bend and twist evidence of truth, just to preserve our identity.
Humility
On the deepest layer, we secretly resist the silent but irrevocable notion that shows through change – how profusely complex and intricate human existence is. How fragile and unpredictable every aspect of it is.
And how hard it is, then, to judge another human, to tell who’s right and wrong, to lead the battles that hold the roots of our identities, and to continue to distract ourselves with everything but a few things that stir the life beneath our skin.
And how impossible it becomes, then, to claim there is anything you truly know.
