Trying too hard to be unlost
Letting go of my agenda of insight
Stop trying to know. You aren't a math problem to be solved.
The whole idea of paying close attention when you are lost is predicated on the acknowledgement that you don't know where you are, nor where to go. The process is to surrender to your not knowing, again and again - not push a solution, or a demand, or an impatient question onto the unknowing.
I've been trying to tell God to tell me who I am and what I am supposed to be and do.
Instead I need to sit myself down right where I am, look around, and listen with curiosity - not insistence.
These thoughts came to me as I was listening to the audiobook of David Whyte’s superb masterwork The Three Marriages in which he talks about the story of Job in the Bible. He quotes from the passage in the King James version where God takes Job to task for the latter's insistence and frustrations.
What I'm doing is actually a form of control. Frustrated because I don't know. And I want to know. Attached to the habit of asking the question "Am I getting there yet?"
I just simply need to do what brings me life. What brings me joy. For no other reason than its doing. And for no other reason than how good it feels in my being. Any output from that will be coordinated by God for It’s purposes.
This is hard to do. Partly because I keep judging myself through the eyes of what I think our culture and society expects of me. I am forever admonishing myself. "I should be this" or "I should be that by now". I feel a driving need to define and report on myself; to see myself through the lens of ‘should’ because I don't look like all those other people who appear to be “on their way”, or at least, don't appear to be as lost as I am.
I feel shame because I think that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing.
Another aspect of my discomfort with my life situation is that I am striving for a resolution to a tension between "feeling good" versus "feeling bad".
Instead I need to accept my human nature as containing transient experiences that include both feeling good and feeling bad. It is inevitable and entirely "normal" that we come and go in our mood states and thinking states. David Whyte talks about Siddhartha (aka the Buddha) who sat under the Bodhi tree pondering his anxiety until he came to the insight was that his consciousness is a constantly changing process that is always flowing. Siddhartha’s Buddha nature sees this but does not identify with it. Instead it just holds the constant flux of thoughts, feelings, and body sensations with compassion and understanding; saying to them "Ah yes, I notice you." Whyte is careful to point out this Buddha nature is not something particular to Siddhartha. We all possess it. It is part of the inherent constitution of our being.
In summarizing the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, Whyte says that “there is something larger and wiser in us that doesn't care if we live or die”.
I have been pushing an agenda of insight onto myself, with the unstated premise - or rather, desperate hope - that I will resolve these inner tensions once and for all. When perhaps instead, the inner tensions are apparent polarities, the energy between which can be reconciled by holding them without attachment (equanimity); trusting that since all is in God and God is in all, no further action or intervention on our part is actually required.
God’s mysterious and generative universe is a constant flux of becoming. It creates form, sustains it, and then releases it. I, like all beings, am at the interface of this ceaseless tide, around and within me.
A robust and resilient process is one which is not resistant to disturbance. Instead, it allows itself to be jostled, gaining strength from the necessary changes required of it to adapt to what is happening. At first we may tense up, but then we release. Like the squeezing of muscles then release. Likewise, I don't need to protect myself from my experience, nor the thoughts and feelings I have about them. Just allow them, go with them - not against them - knowing they will pass and that they are what ‘I’ really am. They are just the reactions of my human animal body’s various sensory and cognitive processes in response to what they perceive as happening.