Messy Old Life
“People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead-ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Historians come along and write summaries of this messy, non-linear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.”
Dean Kamen
Let’s face it, life is messy. Especially for people who expect it to go along without a hitch. Some of us get very upset when life gets in the way of our plans, but it is the very job of the mercurial spirit of life is to mess with our plans. Think how insufferable we would be if life never diverged through a ‘yellow wood’ or directed us into a dark alley.
In the meditation seminar over the weekend, one participant said, “It’s one thing to have this practice in the security and privacy of my own home, especially since I live alone, but when I try to take it out into my everyday life, everything gets confused.” Well, yeah, life is confusing! And the notion that any spiritual path, even one practiced everyday, is going to somehow lift you out of life and allow you to rise above the chaos is simply…well…simple-minded, as well as undesirable.
Life is messy for a reason. It is the muck and the mire that keeps us tethered to the ground. Meditation is a practice that can quiet the mind and still the body and reveal a pleasurable inner reality. But it is not life. And if we get too caught up in the ‘shininess’ of meditation’s other-worldly experiences, we can quite literally lose our grip on reality. It is the weightiness of life, the messy digressions, and serendipitous wrong turns that keep us grounded. We cannot live sanely in an altered state. We need the washing machine to break down, fully loaded with laundry; those guys painting stripes on the road to make us late to work; that speeding freak to cut us off on the interstate! Consider them life’s little gifts to mess with your plans and keep your body and soul together.
It’s all good!
Jane
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