God in Relationship
“Some people help others just to make themselves feel better than they really are.”
I read this sentence and thought: “helping others only to make yourself feel better is not a good thing. It is selfish, it’s cheating, manipulation. It is wrong to want something for yourself. The real, praiseworthy and honorable deed, is the one that does not benefit the doer, a deed that is truly altruistic.”
I know all this, and yet I could not restrain a shudder when I read this sentence. Some people help others just to make themselves feel better that they really are.
I am being myself lately, more than ever before. I am exploring my ways of being. I draw and I write and I make up stories and I begin to believe that I can do all that, only that, because I want to. Because I like to. Because when I wake up in a morning, knowing that I will draw a portrait I started the day before, and I ask myself: “if I were to die tomorrow, would I be drawing this portrait today?” my answer is: “O Yes! Yes, I would.” And that is a reason enough. [click to continue…]
My husband and I had dinner last night in a little restaurant, right on the beach. It was a late evening, the sun was setting and the ocean glowed, blue and green with golden highlights. There were misty cliffs at the far end of the beach, there were little children playing in the sand, there were seagulls and pelicans swooping over the weaves and diving for fish, there were dolphins jumping in and out of the water – it was absolutely, beautifully perfect.
We sat at the table and looked, and watched, and I thought: “it is not true that we need pain to appreciate happiness. It is not true that we need hardships to really feel bliss. I feel blissful now, I enjoy the beauty around me, and the happiness, so much more because it is always there, because it is ordinary, because it’s there every day.”
I said to my husband: “isn’t being here so much more wonderful because now we live here? Now this is what we can experience every day. Doesn’t it become so much more splendid an experience because it isn’t something we only get to enjoy once in a while?” [click to continue…]
How can life be wasted? What does it even mean: wasted life? A friend told me today about her father informing her, that she wasted her life, and it stuck with me, because I could not see how she could do such a thing. I could not see how life could be wasted.
Am I wasting my life? I am not doing what many would agree I am supposed to be doing. I don’t build a career for myself, I don’t have a job nor do I look for one, I don’t have much money nor do I feel I need more. I don’t have children, nor do I plan on having any. I don’t own much, other than clothes, books and some furniture. I have no safety, no security, no property and no prospects of having any. Am I wasting my life?
From my friend’s father’s point of view – yes, I am. But not from my point of view. From the “normal”, “common”, “established”, “traditional”, point of view I have not achieved much in my life. I have not gathered much, I have not accumulated much, I have not created much of what society considers desirable, important, necessary. I have not followed the rules which we all, normally, play by. In fact I did my best no to follow them therefore, from the game’s point of view, from the society’s point of view, my life is wasted. Wasted, because I can never win. I can never win, if I don’t play.
But I have made a choice not to play, and this is what makes my life valuable in my eyes. I have chosen to spend my life on discovering who I am, in relationship to it. There are no rules or structures that can help me with my purpose. No one can tell me what to do or how. None of the “ways of doing things” can be of any use to me if I want to do what I want to do. Because I am the only one who knows what it is that I want, who knows how what I want looks like.
My life is very well spent, according to me, because I chose to create it myself. My life is very valuable, according to me, because I chose to design it and to decide how it looks. I decide whether having stuff or money is important or not, I decide whether being rich is a mark of status and value, I decide whether I should have a job, or work a lot, or not at all. I decide. And because I decide how my life looks like – my life is not wasted.
When I thought about the place from which I see my life, and the place from which my friend’s father sees it, I realized that what he sees as life well spent I see as life wasted. What I see as life well spent, he sees as life wasted. And yet, though our points of view are as different as may be, I do not see his life as wasted – if he has chosen it for himself.
There is a young men I know. He has chosen to be a film maker and decided to put his entire energy and time into it. He doesn’t have a job, he doesn’t have a home. He lives on couches, in guesthouses, supported by his friends. He does odd things here and there to make some money, but other than that he focuses his entire attention on doing what he wants to do in life. What he wants is important to him, everything else is a distraction.
He doesn’t do the right thing, not by a long shot. He does some things that can be questionable, from the normal, moral point of view, and from my point of view. He does some things that I could criticize him for, and yet yesterday, when Chris and I were talking about him, I found myself saying: he really is a quite remarkable man.
As I considered this closer I realized that I do feel that about him. He is not a “good person”, he does some things I would not do myself, but he knows he’s doing them. He chooses to do them, he owns the fact that he is doing them. He decides. He designs how his life looks, he creates it how he wants it. Whether I agree with his choices or not doesn’t matter much – his choices are his, mine are mine, naturally they are different. What matters, I realized yesterday, what is important, is that he is there, present, aware. That he is the one who chooses.
And so today, after I talked to my friend, as I thought about life wasted, I realized that this is what a wasted life means to me: a life that I did not choose, life that is organized for me by others, life that follows the rules set by society, culture, parents, teachers, establishment, anyone but me.
If I am not present in my life, if I am not choosing it, creating it, designing it – then I am wasting it.
The last few months were pretty hard for me. Nothing was happening outside, but inside there were realities collapsing, there was death and distraction, pain and sickness. There was opening and falling and reconstructing and falling apart. It kept me very busy, always focused inward, inside. I haven’t seen it like that though, there was no inside and outside, there was only what was real to me. And for the last few months the stories I told myself were the reality. My mind was reality, my trauma was reality. I was sure it was.
I had no time, no energy, no attention to spare for the rest of the world. The rest of the world didn’t seem nearly as important, as pressing, as interesting. And so, as I withdrew from the world, so did the world withdrew from me. Phone calls stopped, clients disappeared, jobs did not show up anymore. A couple of weeks ago, after paying my rent, I realized that I have no clue where the next paycheck is going to come from.
I knew it’s not good that I don’t know that, I knew that I should be concerned about it, and yet I wasn’t. I tried to focus on the fact that I have nothing to do anymore, but somehow I could not bring it into focus. There wasn’t pain or fear in the idea of having no work and no income, there was only fog. Everything was blurry, there was nothing to hold onto, nothing to think about, and I realized how incredibly unconscious I am, how very not present I’ve become.
So I begun to look, I begun to pay attention. I begun to distinguish feelings, emotions, and to accept them, feel them, let go of them. I would look around, I would listen to what people would tell me, to what my husband would tell me. I would look at my reactions and follow them to their cause, and let go of that. I would choose to be present, I would choose to be myself only, over and over again.
I could feel a difference in my presence, a difference in how I experienced reality. Everything became sharper, more distinct. I noticed sounds and smells that I wouldn’t have noticed before, too focused on myself. I’ve begun to notice my husband again.
After a few days I got the first phone call from a client, then more followed, until I had enough work to keep me busy, and enough money to not have to worry about bills for another few months.
Today morning, as I was making my tea, a thought occurred to me: I thought that I was always taught, as we all were, that I have to be good to be happy. I was told that I have to give away, and then I’ll be given in return. I was told that if I’m loving and kind and caring I will be taken care of. I was told that when I don’t think about myself, when I focus on helping others, I will then be given what I need, that the universe will provide. But I was just given what I needed, the universe provided exactly what I was asking for, and I was not being good, kind and loving. I was being present.
I did not focus on loving kindness the last couple of weeks. When I realized how lost in my thoughts, lost in my mind I’ve become, I did not attempt to selflessly forget about myself and focus on helping others. After months of being distant and irritable, of being short and snappish, I did not decide to be nice, loving, supportive and attentive. I decided to be present.
I decided to be present and I was given all I needed. And I did became kind and loving.
Because I was back in my body, back in the world, I was available for relationship. Because I let go of my mind, of all the stories, traumas, problems, fears, I could see others clearly, I could be with others, relate with them as who they are. My mind was not in the way, my stories and ideas of me, of who I am, were not in the way.
The change in my relationship was so profound that my husband asked me few times if I’m pretending, playing a game, because who I am is so unlike me.
I did become open and selfless and giving and loving and kind and happy naturally, spontaneously, effortlessly. I did not try to, I did not want to, I did not strive to achieve it. I chose to be present. I did not do anything else, just became present. And everything changed.
“New world is here. Life opportunities are only how uniqueness opens a space for invitations for us to graduate from being good. Beyond uniqueness is the opportunity called originality in relationship, which redesigns what can be”. Said Brooks.
Funny he should say that, I thought just now as I read it. I thought about this just last night. I stood in the kitchen last night, cooking. I thought about many things. I just finished going through lines and lines of code, adjusting and tweaking web pages. My mind was very busy, I realized, and so I begun to feel instead.
I felt myself, I felt my body, I felt my house and the mountains beyond it, and gradually I shifted. My mind was still there, chatting away, but I wasn’t it anymore. I let it go, I opened my head, I allowed it to leave.
“I need my mind though” a thought came. “I need mind to work, to function, to make money, to organize life”. I looked at this thought and recognized it. I thought it many times before, said it many times before, and believed it. Yesterday I looked at this thought and realized that I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t need the mind to function, I don’t need the mind to work, to organize my life.
I don’t need my mind to help me fit into reality, to function inside of reality, as it is – instead I can change reality to fit me.
“This is just how it is” I heard millions of times before, we all did. “This is how it works”, “this is how life is”, “yes, we are God, we are Buddha, we are all already enlightened but we also have mind, we are humans and this is just how humans are”, “this is just our human nature”.
All those statements might be true, might be correct, but I believe they are still incomplete. A complete statement would say: “this is just how it is, for now”. This is just how humans are, for now, at this moment.
This is just how it is, I thought yesterday, because this is just how we’ve chosen it to be, this is how we have chosen to relate. If we have reality organized by mind and for mind, it is because we have chosen to organize it in such a way. If we have a set, defined “human nature”, it is because we have chosen to organize it as such. We have chosen, we organized it, we chose how to relate, we chose how to be.
And so I can continue to choose how to relate, how to organize. I can say: this way of relating doesn’t work for me anymore, I am going to relate like this now. I don’t need my mind anymore, I am going to be my body now, be myself now, and this is how I am going to relate with the world.
I don’t have to shift, change, adjust to accommodate reality, because reality will shift, change and adjust to reflect me. Because it is by how we relate that we create reality.
