Today was another mid-sleep wake-up morning. The eyes fluttered open around 4 a.m. for reasons unknown. Oh, I remember the dream that accompanied it - involving me chasing the high school basketball coach around the halls trying to find a VCR tape (insert "huh?") - but it's a mystery as to what the primary factor to my early arousal was.
During those first few waking moments, or at various points throughout a typical day, I'm at my weakest mentally. Thoughts spin through my head that make little sense hours later. Often they're overblown feelings of worry or irritation. Why isn't Mary responding to my e-mail? How am I going to find time to get new tires on my car? Why does Ken put up so much resistance at work? Why did I waste my time trying to help Alan?
The mind's not a machine, it's more like an ocean. Vast in its power for good or bad, beautiful when it's calm, often uncontrollably cyclical with highs and lows.
What I love at moments like this, sitting here in the pre-pre-dawn hours after a half-night of sleep, is our capacity within our minds to do what we can't in the ocean - to rise above it.
To just step back!
We control our lives only to an extent. Call it nature, fate, or God, but there is far more beyond our power than within it. Yet, it's almost addictively easy to measure our worth or success according to our ability to gain the upper hand over things beyond our bodies. We may writhe at times in our compulsion to influence our neighbors and family. It's the infinite hill. And one that we are not required to climb.
We have freedom!
We are not masters of the universe. Nor are we slaves to it. We look at stars, each a thousand times more massive, brilliant and powerful than ourselves, and what is it to us? A fascinating decoration of the creation we live in, nothing more. The people around us are much the same. We are passengers, same as them. Yes, we have total control over our own thoughts, dreams, attitudes as we ride along. We influence our surroundings in varying degrees because of it. We treasure the beauty in others. But the deepest sense of peace I find is when I let that be enough. When I define success entirely apart from how others act, and entirely within living wholesomely.
In moments of weakness, I find happiness when I step back as ruler of the earth, the building, or the person across the table for even a few heartbeats. When I allow what will be, to be. When I look around with sunlight. When I simply smile, and breathe, and savor right where I am.
Life is good!
1 comment:
I say you're just fine, so long as Mary, Ken, and Alan don't read your blog!!
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