I got stuck in the elevator yesterday. Our Mexico City hotel. My keycard stopped working and I couldn't make the elevator move, nor open it's doors. The doors were thick glass. I could see people walking by, but they couldn't hear me calling. Finally, someone saw the guy dancing and waving behind the glass, and took mercy. 

 

I made it back to the room to retrieve something from the computer before going to teach. By now I'm late, someone waiting for me downstairs. I hate to make anybody wait. But my computer is dead. Now even more late, having to deal with that. 

 

I take care of what needs to be taken care of with as little drama as possible and get to the new students without more trouble (unless you count Mexico City traffic), and without behaving at all in a non-meditation teacher way, but feeling absolutely graceless and just a bit out of sync.  

 

I search in vain for an over-arching truth here, for some way of seeing this comedy of errors as something more than random occurrence, or something other than the universe punishing me, and though I am able to avoid those conclusions, I am met with the idea that sometimes meaning escapes us. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar. 

 

The Veda says that everything has meaning, that everything is infinitely connected. But the knowledge of that meaning and correlation may not be apparent to me now, or a year from now, or perhaps ever. 

 

The promise of nature is this: that if I pay attention to consciousness I will know what I need to know, when I need to know it. And it might be as simple as one day listening to the tale of someone who gets stuck in the elevator of their hotel in Singapore, finally gets to their room only to find their computer kaput, and feels somehow like a failure, spiritually, because they have a moment or ten of getting angry and blaming something or someone for their discomfort; and after listening to them, I am able to say, "Boy, I know just how you feel," and they know absolutely that I mean it. And maybe that's all they'll need to go forward from there.

 

Today I will open myself to the idea that my life has meaning, even at those times I'm not able to find it for myself.

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View from Hotel 

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