I often wonder what comes first: the chicken or the egg. How did I land in this beautiful house, with this amazing partner and stunningly meaningful work for which I get paid a living wage? There has been a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, and also a lot of wonder and amazing conclusions.
I often cannot tell which action in my life resulted in where I am or a particular effect. I have been reading a lot about Karma lately in preparation for Seminary and the one thing I am finally getting is that it warns us that things are never as simple as A leading to B, or even A and B leading to C. Causes have supporting causes, conditions, circumstances. Everything is interacting with everything else. So to say "I went to this meditation class and the rest is history" is both a fallacy and has accuracy.
Two things I know for sure, though, that have equally affected me are writing and Buddhism. It comes together often, like today, that the things I learn from one are clearly manifest in the other. Today I am meeting with my editor to talk about my memoir, and editing is no longer as scary to me as it used to be. How can that be? How can I have gone from hating it to looking forward to it, secretly? It's not masochism - I don't look forward to criticism. But I look forward to finding fault so I can rework it into magic.
I feel the exact same way, 99% of the time, now about *myself* - if I have done something unhelpful, unbeneficial to myself or someone else, I want to know about it. I used to hate that, feel that I had been exposed, found out, that I was an imposter of a person who was secretly horrible. Now, it's more of a "Huh. Sorry about that. Now what can I do to make it better?"
I feel almost as if I am in the same place in my life, my meditation practice and my writing, especially right now.
So, I don't much care which came first for the moment. I just care that I am here.
I was writing about something similar in my journal this morning. This is beautiful, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE the picture!
ReplyDeleteI miss you and I hope you are well.
Steph
PS - Did PayPal go through?
Thank you for this great post. It came at a perfect time. To realize that a mistake is a learning opportunity is not always easy, but it means we learned, we are capable or learning and most important of all-- we don't have to suffer through the same mistake if we can recognize it as such.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to reading your book.
Way happy to read this, and way way happy for you! Much love.
ReplyDeleteThanks, all.
ReplyDeleteTeresa - I love how you say that, the sort of way in which even learning from a mistake is a chicken/egg situation. Recently a friend stated that she has to live something 100 times over before getting the lesson out of it - indeed.