I had the great gift of realizing in my teens that there was no blueprint for living a great life. There was no instruction book from parents or anyone else that was reliable for my life. Living inside the question of how to live a great life has continued to be a guiding question. How do relationships work? What happens when you break your word? Stop communicating? Get really tired and stressed? Care or not care about what you're wearing? How do you speak so you're heard? Can just anyone be great? What happens when I die? What, in fact, truly matters to me?
When I was sixteen, I was falling apart. I had erected an interior scaffolding to hold my perceptions of my parents, their split up, my father's departure, my mother's distance...and the scaffolding was not holding, anymore. I actually believed that I was happy until one fall afternoon in my 16th year when was sitting in the dining room and could not focus on my homework. This was a big problem being in a private girls' school in Manhattan. One conversation after another helped to sort out what to do and with whom and I was soon in psychotherapy.
I had the good fortune to get into the seminar created and facilitated by my therapist. It offered readings in the great religions, psychology, biology, philosophy and the lives of saints/gurus/heroes. It was called "The Interior Life Seminar," and that is what we explored. The framework for all our discussions was a question: what is the best life I can live? We had total freedom to like or dislike anything we read and not to have to explain the reasons. I was an eager participant and the youngest one in that seminar for three years before going away to college. The readings and discussions planted in me an inclination toward interdisciplinary thinking, looking at several points of view, and recognizing how one avenue, point of view or discipline can mask or hide others. We need many voices to hear one voice.
Dante's Inferno begins with the famous line: "In the middle of my life, I found myself lost in a dark wood." How many times have we found that we were lost? "Who's living my life, anyway?" -- we whisper in trepidation. This is healthy anxiety...as long as we don't get stuck in it and do get into action!
Today is my monthly Zen retreat. It is led by a Trappist monk who is also a Buddhist teacher or sensei. At the end of six 25-minute periods of sitting and deep silence alternating with slow walking, we read together these words: "It is time to awaken, awaken. Do not squander your life."
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.... I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (Walden, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For.")
To live deliberately. I find lately that I am less interested in whether someone is good or bad, which isn't to say that there are not good and bad people (a mixture, of course). However, I am more drawn to the person who is living deliberately. How awake is this person? Does she have a commitment to craft a life she can be proud of? Is this man really thinking through his choices? When I am around such a person, I wake up out of my sleep, which is often uncomfortable. However, I am creating self-respecting hours these days and inhabiting my skin and don't much care about being uncomfortable, anymore.
The Fundamentals Tripod™ distinguished in the first three newsletters points to three paths to wake up to the mental and spiritual sludge that accumulates in all of us. Cleaning up broken promises, communicating what you have been hiding and completing unfinished business (see the Archives link below to review these articles).
And how are you?
I love hearing from subscribers: 860-435-0288 or eppervesce@aol.com. Websites: www.spiritualcentercoaching.com and www.let-resentments-go.com
Archived Newsletters
