Every now and then I am brought up short by just how wobbly a life I am living. By wobbly I mean how my life seems one way but is occasionally revealed to be something quite different than I expect. This morning, for example, I was driving to an irrelevant (to you) destination when with absolutely no warning I began to feel good. I noticed it immediately. It was kind of a shock to emerge from the haze of everyday living and actually come close to feeling happy and at peace. A shock, mind you, of the most pleasant sort. Unfortunately it was kind of like driving under a bridge during a heavy rain; there is a split second of clarity, then back into the deluge.
I wish I could put my finger on what triggers these encounters with my center. I would say that a good deal of my efforts to find a consistent spiritual path focus on creating a more reliable relationship with this elusive part of me. So much of the time I spend aiming towards what comes next that actually just being in the moment is a rare experience. And this is not about a state of action, it is purely about a state of mind. What I mean is that I am always thinking about what I am doing, not just doing it. And often when my mind stops working at those moments of deep immersion, it feels so alien to me that I stop whatever I am doing. Somehow I feel like I might get lost, I guess.
In this sense, I guess life becomes the ultimate spiritual practice. It is not really about mindfulness or (as I have implied in these writings before) mindlessness. It is merely about being; being fully in the present moment, without thinking about it, longing for it, striving to find it; none of these things--just being in it.
Clearly that can not happen every minute of our lives--that's kind of living a lobotomized life, I'd guess. But what surprises me about my own life is that though I seek out such moments of "being" with meditation and chanting and such, they are so much more powerful when I just find myself in them--just because. That could be just the surprise of finding myself in an unexpected state of mind, or it could be that it is the most honest possible kind of encounter with the spirit that we can have. The kind that is truly unencumbered by anything but ourselves laid out plain and simple.
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