Playful Perspectives

Time and Space August 29, 2011

I want to put a marker down.  To touch ground and say that I am here.  Yesterday I had an image in my head, an aha, about my journey these last six months or so.  I don’t know what it is caused by, or whether or not a process has been happening.  I can only say that around the time of my grandmother’s death I started to make my life smaller.  I started to say no to commitments even though they gave me energy, they made me feel alive, part of something, they reflected my wider values.  Along with the decision to say no, was the sense of guilt and responsibility that you have let people down, fallen in their regard for you. It is an uncomfortable feeling.  I started to do this in other areas of my life, some just by checking out, and others more purposefully or consciously, with different degrees of responsibility.

It was hard for me to let go of some of these commitments because they did give me pleasure and value.  And yet the one place that I struggled to be, was home.  Home in me and home within my home.  I have talked about the drudgery before, the yearning to escape, and yet at New Year, I made a commitment to place my focus right here, on home and all that that is to me.  Struggle would be one word that springs to mind, as I describe the experience of home.  It is very hard to be present here.  It is a beautiful home, gorgeous yet challenging children (who’s aren’t?) and a wonderful, fully supportive husband.  So what was ‘wrong’ with me that I struggled to be present here?

And what I have found, like a vortex, that when you gather all your energies in, and you are left with you, your thoughts, your emotions, is that action is the path to acceptance.  I can sit all day and wallow in how awful the drudgery is, it is very easy for me to get stuck there.  Or rather than looking at the weed that needs to be pulled up, or looking at the pile of clothes that need to be put away, and looking at all these things that I ‘need’ to do, and then thinking about how much energy they will require to do them at some point in the future: if I mindfully take action, the struggle and resistance is superceded by an energy that can purposefully get it done AND set the struggle at bay.

Whilst I am not particularly proud of how ‘small’ my life has become for now, I am delighted that I have found a meditation that enables me to be at one with the struggle.  Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbinger Institute describes this process far more fully than I am here.