The Comings and Goings of Life
There are moments when nothing particularly profound seems to be happening. You’re sitting in an airport waiting for a delayed flight. You’re watching a family with little kids. Somebody across from you is staring into space. People are getting coffee, looking at their phones, wandering toward their gates. You’re not having some great spiritual experience. You’re just sitting there living life and watching other people live it. But that can be enough. It doesn’t have to come out as a particular insight or some piece of wisdom you can explain later. Being present is already a form of wisdom. There is something about simply watching the comings and goings of life without needing to do anything with them that begins to loosen the usual boundaries of the mind.
We tend to block ourselves off as little islands. That’s ego - the illusion of separativity, and it’s part of the definition we’re handed in the human condition: I am here, you are there, and we are separate. We live as though this separateness is an absolute fact. Then you have these little moments when you move outside of it and sense unity - we’re all part of the same fabric of existence. You realize how much life there is beyond the borders of your own concerns. There is so much richness. The toddlers in the airport, the old guy sitting there doing nothing, the parents trying to manage everybody, the people arriving and leaving. They are all part of it. We’re all the flavors of existence. Some people are aware of that and some aren’t, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are awake enough to notice.
Ordinary Life Is Where You Study the Mind
Once you begin paying attention this way, ordinary life becomes a great place to study the mind. You notice the judgments that come up. You notice your preferences, your reactions, the stories you immediately want to tell about somebody. You don’t have to pretend those thoughts aren’t there. You can see them and let them go. That’s very different from following them. Somebody does something and there is an immediate reaction in you. Okay. Interesting. There it is. Now what? Do I want to build an entire story around what they did, what they should have done, why I’m right, why they’re wrong, what this means about me, what this means about them? Or can I stay here and continue watching?
That sounds simple until another person gets close enough to really push the buttons. Relationships are wonderful for this because you get to see ego up close and personal. You see what happens when another person wants something from you. You see where you automatically defer, where you become attached, where you want somebody to behave differently, where you feel crowded, where you try to control an outcome. You also begin to understand that another person’s desires belong to them. They can have their hopes and dreams and schemes. You don’t have to get pulled into them. You can love somebody and still remain where you are, in your own truth. You can enjoy what is happening now without turning it into a promise about six months from now. Sometimes “maybe” is a wonderfully honest answer.
That kind of honesty creates room in a relationship. We do our lives. We come together. We have fun. We learn from each other. We see what gets stirred up. You don’t have to get unconsciously pulled into another person’s vortex of desire before they even understand what it is themselves. You can keep learning about your own attachment without demanding that they learn about theirs on your timetable. If somebody respects your freedom, and you respect theirs, a lot becomes possible. They may be dreaming about a trip to Europe while you’re simply enjoying dinner tonight. Fine. Europe can wait. Reality is here.
Pain Is One Thing. The Story Is Another.
We have an odd habit as human beings of going back into our stories, particularly the painful ones. What we’re mad about. What somebody did. What isn’t fair. What hurts. We become extremely skilled at this. We tend to use our life energy more for recounting what went wrong than for remembering what was beautiful. You can have an extraordinary day, a beautiful dinner, a trip, a celebration, an afternoon full of love, and the mind can wake up the next morning and go straight back to whatever is bothering it.
What about when a loved one is suffering? There is a skill in learning how to be with another person without automatically following them in their suffering. You can hear someone’s pain without climbing inside the consciousness they have built around the pain. You can love them without joining every storyline. Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is remain present enough that both perspectives can coexist. You don’t have to be afraid of their pain, and you don’t have to make their pain your own. Pain is one thing. What the mind does with pain can become something much larger. You don’t have to follow the heavy state of others as they complain simply because it comes up. You can recognize, “I could go there right now, but I don’t need to.” That isn’t avoidance - it’s discernment. Wisdom includes knowing your own capacity.
This is also something you learn about your own mind. There can be a subtle belief on the spiritual path that every difficult feeling has to be entered, examined and wrestled to the ground because that must be where the growth is. That’s therapy and sometimes people need that. As a teacher, I often find myself rolling up my sleeves to go into difficult places with students. What happens then? We look with curiosity, without judgment, with acceptance. Then the charge lessens and becomes a point of learning about how ego was formulated. That’s not only useful, it’s freeing. Once you see the issues, the tendencies without locking in and judging, then you can do something about it.
Touch Lightly
When something difficult in life does need to be faced, the real practice is learning how to stay with it without immediately turning it into a story. Feel the part of you that is being pulled. Watch the tendency. See how familiar it is. You’ve gone down that road a thousand times, so of course the mind wants to go there again. But this time you stay. You allow yourself to be with it in a light kind of way. This is the way you can touch lightly in your world. Just being with the emotion and not using your mind to indulge in stories or create narratives. As humans we misuse our creative powers to impregnate difficult experiences with reactionary emotions that keep birthing new emotions. And then we’re far away from our center. We’ve spun out into an entangled web of fog and confusion.
You don’t have to do this. You can feel what’s happening within you. If you’re with a person, you can acknowledge them. You notice the interface happening on the surface while, underneath it, life is still moving. Awareness is still there. The life force that makes any of this possible has not gone anywhere. Two human beings are standing there in the middle of an enormous existence, having a strange little encounter, possibly learning something. Either way, you can take responsibility and stay with the initial reaction and emotion without it going anywhere. Without blaming someone else.
Fear as a Doorway
For example, if you’re dealing with fear, facing it is powerful. When you can’t face it and are completely caught in it, yes, a teacher with a wider perspective can sometimes help you see beyond it. For a moment you borrow their perspective and discover that the fear isn’t the whole world. Eventually, though, you learn how to make that movement yourself. You begin to recognize fear while it is happening. You stay with it. You stop feeding it quite so many stories. Slowly, the part of you that can see the fear becomes stronger than the part that automatically follows it. Fear itself becomes a doorway to fearlessness.
Over time you develop muscles you didn’t have before. You become more capable of remaining with yourself when things get difficult. You can sit with someone who is unhappy without becoming unhappy with them. You can love someone without taking responsibility for all of their desires. You can notice judgment without needing to believe it. You can be delayed in an airport and discover that there is nowhere else you particularly need to be. None of this means you become passive. It means you have more choice about where your attention goes.
Refuse to Leave
One of the great things about being on the path is that you keep seeing, growing, getting stronger and becoming more skillful. Sometimes the practice is so simple: refuse to leave. Stay with yourself. Stay with the moment. Stay with your love. Stay with your truth. You don’t know exactly what will happen if you do. Something will. Life has a way of showing you the next thing when you are actually here to see it.
And maybe that is part of the cosmic joke. We are born to get moved far away from our truth, to align to a false set of man-made value systems where we become so very good at criticizing ourselves and others based on that value system and suffering when we don’t live up to it. We learn to leave the moment, creating the stories, holding the judgments, nursing the grievances and chasing the future. Then the game becomes cutting through all that to get to the core of truth that is life without definitions and descriptions, to get to the essence of life without our constant micro-judgements and ego assessments. And eventually we learn how to stay with life. We get our out of control mind under control and keep it out of the way. Then we’re open minded, open hearted.
Then an airport becomes a meditation hall. A relationship becomes a teaching. A difficult conversation becomes practice. A delayed flight becomes several extra hours of existence that you actually get to notice. You start to realize that life was never waiting somewhere else. It was present in you the whole time.
Beautiful sentiments, thank you for sharing 💚