Experience is experience. Stay with that for a minute. You might say, “duh, yeah, so what?” But there is something fundamental about this statement. Experience is experience, not good experiences are good and not bad experiences are bad. They just are different experiences.
I was looking at my life this morning as I drank the first cup of tea of the day and I caught myself wishing for something else, something more. Why? Why do so many of us do that, waste the experiences we actually have by longing, day dreaming or chasing a different one. The mother who wonders what it would be like to have the freedom that motherhood does not provide and the childless woman who wonders if by not having children life has passed her by. The single person who wishes he wasn’t and the married one who wishes he was. The financially successful man who stresses and would love to have less responsibility and the struggling one who wishes she could have the choices and freedom she thinks money affords. Each season offers its particular gift, enjoy winter while winter is and stop dreaming of summer. There is greatness and wonder and lessons in just about every aspects we’ve been dealt and in every turn our life takes. We waste them, wishing our life to be different.
How can you live YOUR life, the one you have and get as much out of it as you can, don’t rush through it, trying to accumulate different experiences just so you feel your life has had meaning, that it has mattered, that you’ve lived well. Living well is not in how many experiences, relationships, or possessions we have, living well is about how awake we are during the few experiences we do have. Most people live life like a bad vacation through Europe, as many places in as short a time as possible, four countries in 10 days. That kind of mentality affords plenty of pictures and plenty of stress, but very few meaningful and deeply experienced moments.
Stop chasing, stop fighting, stop running. If it is meant to be, it will be. Life will unfolds as it needs to, to provide an experience, not good, not bad, just an experience. Our job is not to judge it, dissect it, grasp it or fight it. Our job is to trust that this experience in some way makes sense, whether you see it or not is of no importance. Dive and the net will appear. Just allow yourself to experience, to be there for it, fully and to learn from it, and then move on to the next one when the time comes. Our job is to trust that this universe is nothing less than perfect, wise, loving and intelligent consciousness and it makes no mistake, not in you and not in life. In many ways our lives are nothing more than a succession of blessed accidents. Life truly is like a box of chocolate, you never know what you are going to get inside. One thing I do know for sure, no matter what‘s inside, it’s still chocolate. So enjoy the one you’ve got, before tasting the next one.
Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.
-ivc-
2 comments:
daydreaming is an experience too....sometimes the loss we mourn for is not so much the supposed lack but more of the process of one emotion auto-evolves to another connected thought.... the desire to re-initiate mourning after it has diminished can be as comfortable as an old shoe too...I don't fight my longings so much as play the witness. Oh hell.......you already know this blather.
This reminded me of one of my favorite quotes:
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.:)
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