The Way to Now

Surrender is not a word we often like to hear, much less think about doing.  It sounds weak.  It sounds like we just can’t hack it and so we resort to surrender.  Today is Ash Wednesday, and for me, Ash Wednesday symbolizes our fragility and also our strength in letting what will be, be.  Ash Wednesday signals the start of Lent, the Christian season of repentance and preparation for Easter.  Why do we need to prepare for Easter?  It is because throughout the year we forget about the our vulnerability and our need for a Savior.  Throughout the year, we begin feeling like we are doing it all on our own.  We are controlling our destinies and our futures.  But, when the unexpected happens, it can throw us into a bit of a tizzy.  By tizzy, I mean drinking the whole bottle of wine or being so frustrated with our partner that it makes a tiny problem feel insurmountable, as if our life is about to be ruined forever … over a messy kitchen!  When we feel like we have control, we start acting control-ish.  We become control hungry.  Control is the thing that keeps everything normal and manageable.  So, at whatever point your annual crisis comes, you feel the weight of the whole world descending upon you and you cannot be consoled.  The worst thing someone can tell you is to not try to control it.  First of all, they are not supposed to point out your control-freak tendency, and secondly, it makes you realize you are probably self-imposing your crisis.  What it comes down to is trying to play God.  So, every year when Lent rolls around, I remind myself that I have very little control over the world and what happens outside of my small circle of friends.  Who am I kidding, I don’t even have control over that.  On Ash Wednesday I sing the songs of surrender, I get imposed with ashes on my forehead,  I remember that from dust I was created and to dust I shall return.  I feel myself breathe in and and I notice a distinct need to breathe out, to exhale.

The Ash Wednesday service is one that rebalances the soul.  It feels almost unnatural to take myself down a notch, to remove myself from the overwhelming echo in society that says you have to follow a prescribed set of steps in order to be successful.  Intentionally coming out of that path allows me to examine a little more objectively what path I actually want to continue on.  While marketers really only have one message, work harder so you can have more, we actually have many other options from that.  During this time, maybe more because of my personal circumstances than the Lenten season in particular, I feel like I’m changing course.  I’m choosing a new path.  It feels different because it is not in a controlling way of wanting a certain outcome, but more of an open exploration of being in balance.  I think Lent for me this year is marking the first steps on a new path that has no mandatory goals, no set ladder of success.  It feels like the beginning of an adventurous trip to a new place I’ve never been.  I had the same excited feeling before I flew to Kenya.  It’s a whole new world, and I knew it would change my life forever.

My journey over the last year or two has been one of coming to this place of surrender.  Surrender to what is.  Surrender to non-control.  Surrender to God.

The other day I had one of those moments where it feels like it’s all coming together – hallelujah!  It is sort of like the moment of realizing graduation is actually going to happen, or the moment of seeing that a great plan came together, or the feeling of taking a big deep breath of rain-soaked air.  As I kind of expected, it took a whole month to get my backed-up system to download and unload and be in a position to rest.  And, it’s funny because rest now is not what it was one month ago.  Rest a month ago meant not talking to anyone, sleeping in, lounging, not planning anything besides a daily workout.  Now, it feels like I have more energy and want to do more things, but not busy things, Sabbath things.  I’m resting in the goodness of God, resting in the joy of friends, resting in the peace of my life.  Can I get an amen?

The thing about perseverance is that it gets you anywhere you really want to go.  There isn’t a thing I can think of that would not eventually happen if someone persevered through what looks like hazardous road signs or stalled progress.  With all this talk, you would think I was going to announce I was pregnant.  Nope.  But this whole journey that I first thought was a journey to become pregnant is really about learning to find balance.  Since August 2009, I have been seeing an acupuncturist who is also a practitioner of TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine).  I have been going weekly.  After the Haiti earthquake happened in January, the clinic held a fundraiser with free appointments and donations going to Doctors Without Borders.  I thought this would be a great time to see another woman at the practice who does Acutonics and is a natural health practitioner.  Acutonics is the use of metal tuning forks that vibrate.  When they are put on certain points of your body, you feel the vibration throughout, like a deep centering gong.  During our abbreviated session that day, she asked if I wanted to make an appointment and it just so happened that my usual acupuncturist was out of town the next week.  When I went, she listened to all of my concerns, she suggested great readings, she prescribed a Bach Flower tincture and she said I should go see yet another acupuncturist in town.  I guess each practitioner is different in the same way that each church is different.  The guy she was referring me to has a gift for reading the body’s systems and pinpointing any imbalance.  He had a particular supplement she thought I might need.

In following this whole path of people who were connecting me to other people, I sensed I was getting closer to where I needed to go.  I made the appointment with Bing Lee (I love his name) and proceeded to follow a trim Asian man down a hallway to a treatment room.  He only asked what my primary concern was.  I told him it was fertility issues.  He asked me to lie on the acupuncture table and he would read my system.  I didn’t know if I should close my eyes during this seemingly critical moment in the treatment, but I was too curious.  I kept my eyes open and could see him out of my periphery – his eyes were closed and his hands were sweeping my essence toward him.  It sounds weird, but here’s what he came up with.  He said, “I know what’s wrong.”  After hearing about a dozen people say they don’t know what’s wrong, this was crazy.  He said my hypothalamus is burned out.  There is only one way the hypothalamus can be fried (essentially), and it is from over-thinking!  Over-thinking – who ever heard of such a thing!  I knew immediately what he meant.  I am a chronic over-thinker.  It’s a habit, like smoking or biting one’s fingernails.  It comes without effort and with an obsessive-like fervor.  Feeling sheepish for having burned out my own hypothalamus, I was all ears for hearing how we cure this bad boy.  He said he had a supplement to give me, a hypothalamus supplement – it contains pig hypothalamus, and he wanted to see me back in two weeks.  I would think this is all crazy-talk, but he did not know a thing about me and he nailed me on over-thinking, and said that it was mainly about unresolved issues over career – hello, two months off from work so I can regain my sanity!  I am currently taking my pig hypothalamus and I will see him again in a couple weeks.

Not only did this come about, but I also saw my western doctors who gave me the go-ahead for starting another round of fertility medicines.  Bing Lee assured me the treatments would not interrupt one another, but that if I do not take care of my body’s imbalance, I will pass it on to my child.  Yikes!  I am pretty sure my mom passed it on to me – I love her, but she is an over-thinker like no one’s business.  Here’s how the day continued coming together.  I picked up the book that the natural health practitioner said I should read and I read the chapter basically pinpointing where I missed the mark in all this western ambition we seem to have been bred to showcase.  The book is called Sabbath by Wayne Muller, and is fabulous.  In this passage, he is pointing out that Buddhists have these philosophies about desire and happiness that really get at the crux of the suffering so many of us feel.  Desire is what comes about through our natural impulses.  Our society cleverly eggs us on with advertising and lifting up a culture of consumption.  As soon as we feel desire, we are bound to feel suffering.  This can happen in a number of ways.  One is that once we desire a bigger house, then we will suffer because, down the road, we will want a bigger house still.  If there is an expensive item we desire, and we convince ourselves to buy it, we will feel suffering because of our empty bank account.  It is very hard to allow desire to come without suffering.  The alternative to desire is happiness.  Seeking happiness happens in a very different way.  Happiness comes not in consumption, but in generosity.  Simplifying, not complicating.  Being happy usually comes with experiences and people and time.  Give yourself one of those gifts.

As all my paths converge, I hope to continue seeking happiness.  My priorities will include meditation, rest, and time for friends and family.  Sometimes, we must persevere even to achieve the simple things in life.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Who said that?  I can’t remember but it came to me in a big way after the thoughts I had last week about choices and when to take advantage of different opportunities in life.  At times I feel over-analytical and stress inducing (to myself) and I think, why am I thinking about all of this stuff so much? But then, this quote popped into my head and I see that it is all part of examining one’s life.  I think the worst possible thing might be to slave away at the daily grind and come to the end of your life thinking, I wonder what Paris looks like and I wish I had spent more time with my kids and less time stressing about work.

I recently got to know my husband’s aunt and uncle better.  They are hippies.  They live in a house now, but only in the last eight years.  They spent most of their working years flitting between New Mexico and Alaska.  She’s a teacher turned administrator.  He’s a plumber, carpenter, pot farmer, wanderer.  It is really a kick to know these people now – grey hair, knee replacements, living off the government (social security) but bitching all the way!  They have a wonderful attitude about life.  They go where the wind takes them.  They lived for several years on fifteen acres in New Mexico, in a trailer, with a huge vegetable garden out back, a water well (with the best water in the state, they say), views on all sides, and not a person in sight.  He bathed in a bucket by the fire.  There is something really enticing about that life.  It is simple.  It is not bothered by the world.  Part of my conflict is that I really like the world, and yet, I feel suffocated by it at times.  There can be too much world.  As soon as we pulled back into our driveway, my husband said, our houses are too close together.

Yes, I think maybe our houses are too close together.

What does that mean for our lives that are dependant on the places we work, the stores we shop at, the services we expect (mail, trash, roads)?  When we were out snowshoeing on the aunt and uncle’s land, after an hour, I felt the pull back toward town.  It was time for lunch, I wanted to see people, I needed creature comforts (like a real bathroom).  But, when I get too bogged down in traffic and close quarters, I just want some space and I’d give anything to sit around a fire with all the stars in the world, peeing against a tree.  So what is it?  Is it a perpetual leaning toward being unsatisfied?  Is it a restlessness about feeling caught in this work-world we have created?  Besides all this, I think it comes down to something some friends said to us a few months ago.  There is a real gift in having friends of all ages.  This is a couple that retired early, no kids, and makes the huge decisions we all wish we could make.  They lived in a mountain town for a few years.  When they got bored, they moved back to the city.  They seek out meditation with a Buddhist monk even though they are Christian.  They read several papers and take art classes, but yet, live on a golf course.  You see, what they’ve figured out is the magic of contrast in their lives.

Contrast.

Contrast is what allows camping to seem like a great adventure after the weekly commute between work and home.  Contrast is what makes grand-parenting so great – these are your beloved babies, and yet, you are not with them through every weepy and sleepless night.  It is the glory of a huge mountain around the bend of some foothills and forest.  It is the excitement around engagement and marriage when before you were just an individual living a life for yourself.  It is the same with having a family.  The pursuit to have a family is biological, sure, but it is also the contrast to living selfishly and without knowing if your family with grow and carry on after you die.  The contrast in life is what gives each color its brilliance.  I believe that is why young people seek out adventure.  Travel brings the vibrancy to life at home.  It is time apart from that which has become routine.  If traveling is your life’s work, you may not find it as appealing.  For me, Kenya is a magical place, a place where all my senses come alive and I see things more vividly.  Most people ask why I would want to go to a developing country on my vacation time and spend the same amount of money I would if I went on a cruise.  It is because of the contrast with my own life.  I find the people to be wonderfully different, British accent and all, as they pedal around on bicycles barefoot but always wearing a suit coat and stopping for tea.

The real question is then, for all of us who have just established our careers and hadn’t thought about what’s on the other side: how do we create a life of contrasting opportunities?

I can see for myself that I am in grayscale with my job right now.  Because I desire to have a baby, I no longer desire to put all my energy into my job.  For the last eight or nine years, I have thought only of the ambition to establish my career and shine as the all-star minister.  What I realize now is that it is not a realistic pace for the long-term.  However, maybe short-term bursts are fine if you decide to pursue a life of contrast.  In listening to my hippie aunt and uncle, I heard them say they bounced around from job to job and tried out all sorts of living situations.  They were not afraid of change and were definitely not afraid of what the future held.  That is probably one of the keys to living a life of contrast: no fear.  Believing is a powerful thing and one that I wholeheartedly put my faith into.  We create our lives around that which we believe in.  Perhaps that’s the next question, what do I believe in (my values, desires, faith principles, and dreams) and how is my life taking me there?

When I think about what it means to start a family, it means a lot less energy into a job outside my home and a lot more energy inside my home.  That feels like contrast – that sounds like heaven.