What’s It All About?

 

I am not sure if it is my age, having two kids about to leave home, where we find ourselves at this time in history, all of the above, none of the above, or something I have not yet considered, but I will tell you, I am perplexed these days as to what we are all doing and why. If we could cut through all the surface details, the shoulds, the past, our personal and societal conditioning, the distractions, the dictates of the times, what is this thing called Life really all about? What are we doing here? I feel so corny even writing those words, but it is the truth of what I am feeling. And asking.

A friend recently reminded me that it will only be when the proverbial shit hits the fan that we will be willing to notice, and change, and commit to what matters most. Personally, I don’t want to wait that long. And I don’t want to wade through that much suffering. Is that really the only way that we will wake up? I recognize, and have experienced that that is one way to go. But there is another way. There is the way of love and devotion to something more than yourself. There is a way of being in the world that honors Life on all levels.

The only place I have experience doing this is with my kids. Somehow because of my love and devotion for them I was able to do things I could never do on my own. I was able to sidestep needing to suffer before I would change. I was able to become a different person through the experience of not only considering and stretching for them, but of growing big enough to be worthy of their trust. And their lives. And therefore, Life itself.

And so, these days, I am wondering, what is the equivalent of this in the world, and with the world, for me? Where is that place in all of us that knows the way and that just wants to express what it knows? Without needing to be knocked to our knees before it can happen.

What Are We Really Choosing?

 

I once heard someone say that whatever is behind any choice that we make is, in fact, what we have signed ourselves up to receive more of. Regardless of what we wanted, or thought we were going to get. In other words, if you make a decision based on fear, you have just signed up for more fear in your world. If you make a choice based on scarcity, you have just signed up to learn the lesson of lack. If you choose and act based on trying to appear better or different than you actually are in order to fit in, you have just signed up to learn about deceit and alienation.

Look at your life. Closely. How many times a day do you make choices that are not coming from what you really want, but are instead based on you trying to protect the downside? Or you trying to keep something from happening. How many times a day do you make choices that come out of reactivity, overwhelm, stress and busyness only to be met with more of the same? How often do you choose based out of denial, avoidance and disconnection? Have you ever linked up your motivations and mind states to the results that you are getting?

In the yogic tradition that I hail from, it is never about what you do. Instead, it is always about why you do what you do. This is the exact opposite of what we, and our children, are creating through social media where the “what” something looks like reigns supreme and above all else. Under the auspices of “connection,” what I would define as a mutual and reciprocal coming together for the benefit of both parties, more times than not, our use has more to do with spinning, glamorizing and inflating the self. Instead of a give and take in our interactions with others, there is a kind of side by side marketing of ourselves to each other and how it is that we want to be known.

What if we could really see that that every time we try and get people to see us through untruthful ways, we have just signed up for a falseness between us. And that every time we try to get a greater sense of belonging by garnering more likes and followers through misrepresentation, exaggeration and obsessive preoccupation with the wrong things, we have just signed up for an experience of isolation, fragmentation and dissatisfaction.

The technologies push and magnify our social buttons; our deep-seated and innate needs as human beings to be seen and to belong. For there to be any chance of the technologies benefiting us in this domain, we must become aware of the “whys” of the “whats” that we are engaging in. Further, we must recognize that our children are not yet capable of this distinction.

Freedom

 

When my children were around two and four, we had had a long stretch of rainy, cold weather on Cape Cod where we were living at the time. After several days of this, we were all so sick and tired of being together in the house that we were all feeling the strain with one another. And so, even though I had no plan, I piled everyone into the car and went for a drive. Somehow we made our way to the beach even though it was most decidedly not a beach day. But like they say, necessity (and a mother’s desperation) is the mother of all invention.

We got out and made our way onto the sand. Because I had not planned on coming to the beach, I had no food, no towels, no toys and no friends. This was something I had never done before, nor even considered, typically arriving at the beach with enough supplies for an army.

Hours later I had to drag them off the beach. From out of their own minds and bodies, and in collaboration with their surroundings, came exploration, companionship, curiosity, creativity and more. Everything they needed was inside of them; aided and brought forth by what was outside of them. It was a pivotal realization for me as a mother to witness just how little they needed, and just how big they could create out of virtually “nothing.”

We are harboring an undermining belief when it comes to our children. We believe that they require entertainment 24/7. We believe that they need lots and lots of externals to be satisfied. We think they need screens and gadgets to do it for them, believing they must be continually wowed, stimulated and done for in their play and interactions. All of this derails their own creativity, natural movement, and imagination, the forerunners of intellectual, social and emotional capacities.

This mentality is robbing our children of the joys that naturally arise in a childhood that is free from too many externals, done fors and distractions. And along the way, we are forgetting that the less they need to be OK, the better, happier and more imaginative they will ultimately be.

“Lies”

 

The day I left to come home after a visit with my mother in Florida, I called the airline just before we were leaving to check on the flight status. The plane was delayed by 15 minutes. When I got off the phone and told my mother this, she demanded the phone number of the airline so that she herself could call. “Why?” I asked. “Because I think you are lying to me.” Huh?

(To give you the back story, my mother was dropping me off at the airport and then going on to play in her Sunday golf group. I had already offered to go earlier so that she would not be rushed. She did not want to do that because she did not want me to wait any longer than I had to at the airport.)

As we began to go back and forth, back and forth about her calling the airline to check on the veracity of my report, a timely piece of sanity crept in during our exchange allowing me to ask, “Why would I lie to you about this?” To which she immediately responded, “Because that is what I would do.” I burst out laughing with the relief of no longer feeling like I had to convince another person that I was not, in fact, a liar. More to the point, I could see that I had been gearing up for something that did not have a single solitary thing to do with me and whether or not I was being honest. It had to do with her and how she would have handled the situation. By her own admission, she would have lied to me if the roles were reversed because she would not want me to feel bad about her having to wait longer at the airport. And because she felt as though the lie would in service to me, she would not have even seen it as a lie.

It has left me wondering; “Do we ever truly know who is in front of us? Or do we just believe they are some reflection of who we are, how we do things, along with our beliefs about how people should be?

In the end, I have decided to stay with just figuring myself out. No one else. What I have found is this; there have been more times than I can count where I have tried to convince another person of who I am or am not. Sometimes I have done this face to face with another. More times than not though, I have done it through the fake conversations and arguments I hold in my own mind. I have spent a whole lot of time with something that has never had a single thing to do with me, ever. Even if it looked like it did.