I am a planner. I like to know what is going to happen, and I think I’ve got a pretty strong “work ethic”. But something has changed, and it has been an incremental change, and an invisible one. I’m probably more adept at what I do to “make a living” than ever before, and at a stage in my life where our culture tells me I should be making preparations for eventual retirement. Storing away things like money, not taking too many chances. This is starting to feel more and more wrong. Even though I’m healthy and strong, my eventual dissolution is on the horizon, and there is nothing I can do about that. So it seems strange to pretend I should be accumulating when I’m actually dissolving. This is all conceptual stuff, but what’s happening in me is more than thoughts.
When I allow nothing to happen - no planning, no attempts to coerce the world around me to bend to my desires, no persuading people to do what I think is good for them and also good for me, I experience spaciousness. It is as if the organs in my body relax. When I begin to do what I’ve done pretty much my whole life - organize my reality to my own benefit - I experience an uncomfortable tension. I realize now this tension was always there, and only because of its absence have I recognized it was there.
I’ve used the same approach to people I’m attracted to. To see them as some kind of resource that will add to my life. Of course there are many layers of relationship and there have been many moments of spaciousness even within this way of relating, but it has been in spite of rather than because of it. The model I have unconsciously been following has never really worked, probably attracted those that were motivated in the same way, and has always ended.
There is something more spacious, more comfortable and real than what I’ve been doing. I know this in my heart, and I know I’m not the only one to yearn for something more expansive, a life that follows the rhythms of nature rather than a cultivation and control of my nature. I don’t have an answer, or a philosophy, or a path for this, because all those things imply a final destination that just doesn’t seem to be there.
So for now I’ll try to stay in the spaciousness. Not because it will get me what I want, not because others should do it to. Just because it feels pretty good.
