letter to a friend...

I wouldn't call you anything but a friend. You don't have to make a difference or justify yourself to me or anyone else for that matter...it's just you. You have to justify your action or inaction to yourself...we all do...and in doing so sometimes we lie to ourselves...but not blatantly. It's a subtle act that takes place over time and becomes habit. We lie to ourselves about why we're not doing what we could be doing, about why we don't help this person or why we don't help ourselves or why we do stupid shit that hurts ourselves or others. I'm not saying you did anything stupid I'm just generalizing.

There is a voice of truth. Everyone has one and sometimes our relationship with that voice is complicated....but this is only due to our resistance towards it.  When we work in accordance with our inner truth the voice grows stronger, it's easier to hear and interpret and follow. When we don't...it's complicated.

I know that you don't sit and stare at a wall all day when no one else is around. There are things you do to fill your time that may not be as productive as you would like them to be. Perhaps you spend most of your free time thinking about others, in the presence of others, organizing things for others and you are so in the habit of this that your time alone feels void. Maybe you spend a lot of time on the internet or playing games or any form of light entertainment that enables you to escape from the void until you can be in the presence of others again. I know about procrastination. I do it all the time. I'm doing it right now. There are things I know I'm supposed to be doing for myself. I only turned on the computer to print out a song list for some compilation cds I made for a friend but I started reading an article on Hermeticism, got curious about what the ibis looks like, started googling images, decided to check my email and here I am.

Shit happens and time slips away and opportunities pass us by and we forgive ourselves these transgressions as we try in small ways to reorganize our priorities so that tomorrow will be more productive than today. Tomorrow will be what today should've been. Tomorrow we will catch up. But the truth is no one ever catches up.

Sometimes you have a really good day where you get everything you planned on doing done...it's not everything that needs to get done...just everything for the day and you get to sit back and bask in the glow of that day's accomplishments...but those days rare even for the most productive people.

It's important that we forgive ourselves for not living up to our own expectations. This is not the same as making excuses for why we haven't. You have to own what you are and then kindly allow that being some wiggle room to make mistakes...and fuck what other people think of where you're at. At the end of the day it's not about them.

Have you ever considered that perhaps you have too much free time? Too much social interaction? Too much of a good thing? So much that you can't tell it's good anymore because there's not enough pain or conflict to compare it too. Pain and pleasure are all relative. The life you're so dissatisfied with could be exactly what someone else would enjoy thoroughly.  Perhaps things come too easy and, because there's no real challenge, you've created your own block. The only way to know for sure would be to fling yourself irretrievably out of your comfort zone. It appears you may have done this at least once already and now you pine for the life you had before but weren't truly happy with either...otherwise you'd still be there...but the reason you're not is ultimately a positive one because some part of you recognized that you needed the change/conflict to grow.

You are creating all the time and you know this, but sometimes we create our way right into our own prisons and we have to destroy those comfortable little prisons to move into the next phase of our lives.

After you all left a member of the group, one you haven't met yet, named David, showed up out of the blue. He was just there getting coffee and he told us a story of how a woman had come to him asking advice. She said she'd had a vision of how ideas were like cardboard boxes but she didn't understand what it meant. He contemplated it for some time and later that day it dawned on him. He recalled something he read in a book of Buddhist philosophy about how you take a raft across a river but once you get to the other side you'd best break it down and turn it into kindling because if you try to carry that raft on your back it's going to impede your progress. That's when he realized what the boxes meant... that ideas are disposable. You pack your things in them, they get you from one place to another, and then you break them down. If you use the same boxes over and over eventually they'll fail...you're supposed to throw them away.

Perhaps before you start trying to manifest anything new you should assess what you have too much of and get rid of it. Break it, burn it, sell it...give it away because you don't need it. You are in possession of things you don't need and now is the time to let them go.


Peace,
G

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