Brace for the ride of your life!

Bozos on the Bus

“I think we are all bozos on this bus.”
Firesign Theater

Do you ever have dreams in which you are in a car traveling very fast, but you aren't in the driver's seat? Sometimes you are even in the back seat, and no one is driving the car! I had a dream in which I was on a bus traveling at great speed down a busy highway. There was no driver; we were flying down the road on auto-pilot. Not only that, but I realized I was on the wrong bus! Dreams can give you a really good picture of what's going on inside you. This one was highly accurate.

Like most folks, I go along thinking my life is on the right track, but as the song says, “we are all bozos on this bus.” Life features what Carl Jung called, “fateful detours and wrong turnings.” We have ideas about how life will look look in the future, but the truth is we don't know what life-altering event may come tomorrow or next week. Sometimes that life-changing event is a good thing—we fall in love, or we're offered a dream job, or we start a family. And sometimes the unexpected changes are painful—we lose a loved one, a relationship, a job; we have a sudden illness or diagnosis. In a flash, the road curves in a direction we had no intention going. Life has a will of its own and we may feel utterly unprepared for what comes next.

My first response to these unexpected turns in the road is usually to pitch a fit. This is not fair! Why me! I don’t deserve this! Sometimes I search for someone else to blame for my misfortune. After the dust settles, I realize I have options. I can turn this way or that, I can go here or there, I can stay with this or move on. Whatever choice I make will bring consequences of its own and these consequences will bring new challenges, new opportunities, and produce other fateful detours and wrong turns. This is good reason to consider one’s choices, to take time to respond rather than react.

My eyesight is not great. I sometimes can’t read street signs or see to thread a needle. My intuition, however, is 20/20, and so is yours. It does not give misleading information. When we suspend or ignore this body-knowing we get into trouble. That usually happens when our gut is telling us something we don’t want to hear. But the body does not lie. Intuition comes from a different place than knowledge. It does not have access to the creative, rationalizing cerebral hemispheres. There is no spin-doctor in this kind of knowing. When we ignore our intuition, we do so at our own peril.

In order to hear our inner wisdom, we must be still and listen. In the words of Wayne Dyer, we must “embrace silence.” We must wonder and ask questions. What am I feeling? What are my feelings trying to tell me? We must be patient and wait for answers. The answers may come in a dream, or a waking thought. They may come from someone else’s words or observations, or from a chance event. We must be open to the possibility of answers coming from totally unexpected places, and when they come, we must act. We must, in other words, be ready to leave behind our fears, complaints, and rationalizations, our blames and shames, hitch up our britches and change direction.

None of us has a single clue what tomorrow brings. We can either face it with a sense of adventure or a sense of dread. The choice is entirely ours to make, and that choice determines how smooth or bumpy, how wild and out of control, the ride will be. We are all bozos on this bus, so we may as well sit back and enjoy the view.

In the Spirit,
Jane