Everyone I know has had some personal tragedy in their life. For some it has to do with inadequate parenting, or parents who left or were taken before their work as parents was completed. For others it is accidents, illness, loss of friends, siblings, and then, perhaps a bit later in life, loss of lovers, spouses, children, careers. Blown opportunities, momentary misguided behavior. Ask anyone. There will be some wound somewhere that affects the way he or she approaches life, some area in which each of us feels handicapped in some fashion, or unworthy of complete happiness and success in life.
Given a choice, most of us would wish to have avoided our own tragedy, or tragedies, and the way they have colored our life. Yet truly these 'life wounds' often turn out to be some of our greatest assets.
Whenever I find myself unable to identify at least some level of joy in my life, I am being shown exactly where my place of resistance lies; and where there is resistance there is opportunity for growth.
When I was a kid, around the holidays we would get catalogues in the mail--J. C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, Spiegel. Wish books, my grandparents called them. Big, fat, glossy doorstops. We'd look through them, imagining ourselves with this or that toy or bike or gun or fishing rod, savoring the feeling of happiness and fulfillment we would have if only we could have that thing. I never was given 'that thing;' and even if I had been, it would not have given me the imagined fulfillment I owned in the promise of it. But the process itself of looking for happiness, of trying on ideas that may give us fulfillment, is a life in miniature. It is a pattern each of us has played out to one degree or another throughout our life. So the mechanism for finding happiness lives there within each of us. We simply have it a bit turned around.
We start from this perspective: there is only one thing. This one thing is the field of all possibilities. It is a field of pure creativity, pure knowledge, pure bliss. I am that field. I am this one thing. If I am not experiencing the qualities of the field, it is because of resistance within my personal being, places where I am identifying with problem, with ego. Places where I continue to see myself as separate from the whole. These are the places where my work lies. These are the areas I am being shown where work put in will yield definitive results.
When we look for the things that we think will make us happy, we are missing the point and skipping some steps in the process. And what's the point? The point is that we don't have to go looking for fulfillment. As expressions of nature, in our least excited state we are fulfillment itself. The experience of ourselves as fulfillment is ours to be had, here and now. It is ours to uncover within ourselves. And those ideas and memories and reasons that come up within us why we can't be happy--because I'm bad, because they did something to me, because I'm too tall too short too fat too thin--these are the 'X marks the spot' in our treasure hunt. Dig in. Find out how to be happy even with this (whatever 'this' happens to be for you). Why else are we here, if not to become the fullest expression of this thing that we are? And what if it really were as simple as finding the joy of existence in each of our days?
It is that simple. And of course it is anything but easy. As my people say, 'Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.'
Find the joy in breathing today, in the slow fading of light in the west, in the cool of the end-of-summer air, and the comedy in the voices within that tell you not to.
Rubber Ducks, Cambria, CA
