Patience, Patience, Patience, Practice, Practice, Practice

I have been telling people that my theme lately is patience.  As in I need some.

Its one thing to know what you are going through, and its another to get anywhere with it.  Sometimes you need to be patient while waiting for more patience to arrive. 

Its strange, this feeling I have of moving at hyperspeed and slow motion all at the same time.  I’ve been like this for months, but now that I have been like this for months its getting easier to switch my perspective between the two speeds.

A few weeks ago, I passed a milestone in my progress for patience and it came by looking in the mirror.  Sometimes the best mirror is another person.  I hadn’t seen my surf buddy D in a couple weeks and when we finally caught up, it was all talk about the new surf spot and the bigger waves and the effortless pop-ups, and the double wave rides into the sand.  Who was this person? A  week later it was discouragement and annoyance.  Its pretty easy to read her patience-with-surfing meter, its usually directly proportional to how long she stays in the water, and that sunday it was about half as long as she normally goes in, and the next tuesday?  Well, I’ll give her a pass. Sure I am dragging her over the coals here, but the point of this is that I was able to see pretty easily that we have both come a long way over this summer, and that a session or two or three or more of less than hoped for performance is a meaningless blip in the grand scheme. 

The light of the sun reflected off the mirror, blinding me for a sec. Oh, yeah.

Just because we can see where we want to be so clearly doesn’t mean we want to skip the getting there.  There is a LOT of joy in the journey.  I can imagine having lived an ideal life: there I am at the end, lying in a bed, old and white and feeling comfortable and happy and complete having lived a full life of integrity and adventure following my dreams, ready to move on as I take my last easy breath.  I DO NOT want to jump straight there!!!

Its so easy to get lost in the wrong time scale.

For surfing, which is something safe and easy for me to look at though my impatience extends FAR beyond sporting activities, there are other shifts in perspective that have been relevent. I found that once I had some really great rides, I stopped counting the trivial ones.  Not just that, but I stopped even trying for the little ones as much.  They used to be so much fun!  But now that I have had a taste of the good stuff, well, gimme, gimme, gimme, more, more, more!  But I am still transitioning, so it does me no good to ignore the fact that I have raised my standard…its going to take practice and time to make my new norm.

I did manage to make some inroads in my patience with my kids and what works there is to focus on love. When my kids are driving me nuts with attitude or some trivial thing they are arguing over, I just try and remember how much I love them.  It took a while, but that seems to help.  Its not like you can just decide to do adopt some new perspective or habit and then all of a sudden everything changes, but if you keep trying to do it, it actually makes a difference eventually — faith helps there.

Another technique that I am employing now with my impatience in relationships is to look at my attachments and desire.  I am so greedy!  I find something I like and I want more more more and as soon as I get something, its barely enjoyed before I am waiting for the next more more more.  When I get like, that I find that I am grasping and greedy over things that aren’t even real. If I imagine that what I desire doens’t exist anymore, suddenly I can see the parts that are real, and the greed and clinginess goes away. This is true for when I am waiting for some validation from a person I really like, or whether its a big wave I hope I’ll be riding.

When you let the right things go, you can carry so much more.

I lost my legs

I’ve been hanging out with this woman KD who was had to do some hard stuff in her life.  She’s not bitter or sad, and doesn’t whine or complain — quite the opposite.  She seems to enjoy her life and to make the best of it with integrity and purpose, taking a kind, positive view of her life and the people in it.  Her ten year old son suffered some brain damage when less than a year old and is developmentally disabled, requiring permanent assistance.  She has raised him and a daughter as a single mom for the last several years.  The internal foundation of loyalty and love that she has chosen to construct her life upon comes through quite clearly to me.  There is something very solid about her character that I admire.

The other day she shared a little bit about the problems of meeting other people who are scared of what she has to deal with.  I could see some pain and frustration.  She said, ‘He is my son, how can I do anything but care for him?’  She looked at me,  ’If you were married to someone and they lost their legs, would you leave them?’  Ahhh, now thats a question that resonated with me. I answered no pretty quickly.  I told her that I was a loyal person.   It had been something that I had thought about before, I saw it as a kind of defining question about what a marriage commitment was.  To me, the answer to the legless loyalty question was answered with the ‘I do’ of marriage, and that seemed right, even with my freshly muddled view of what marriage really means.

She responded the same but didn’t need to; her answer was obvious from the way she asked it.  But there wasn’t any question anyway, she had already followed through on it. She had made her choice and had proof of that kind of unconditional love and loyalty.

It made me wonder why so many marriages don’t survive.  How many people would leave their spouse if they lost their legs?  How many of those who say they would stay get divorced for more trivial reasons?

I wonder what I would do if I was married and I lost my legs and my wife stayed with me.  Would I have the strength to set her free? Would I have the strength to ask her to stay?

Thats not something I want to know the answer to.

From ‘hey, how ya doin?’ to hot, passionate kisses

Here is my first real personal ad — I put my location as ‘wonderlust’. I was thinking of starting a blog with that name, but its already been taken and used and abused, its even a band name.  I gave up a surf session (ha, the sacrifices I make!) to write the ad and I posted it on craigslist about a week ago. 

I am putting it out here for a couple reasons, but mainly I want to put more light on this area of my life so that I can grow better faster, and it does fall under things I need to desensitize myself to.  I think I read someones goal of meeting someone new every day, wow!  My life just isn’t arranged where thats very likely to happen.  I suppose I could rearrange it , like start riding the bus, etc., but I would find it very difficult to do that.  I like the idea of having a goal though.   

————————–

My wife dumped me several months ago, thank god! Pathetic that I stayed with her so long waiting for her to figure out that to be happy she needed to learn to be happy with herself. I’m still a bit mad that I sold myself short, but I don’t let it define me.

Here I am. Learning to be the person that I want to be. On the one hand, its a bit disappointing to have these thoughts at 40. On the other, its not so bad as I realize that I am not too far off, that the things that I want are mostly there, that I have done a good job of taking care of myself, living with integrity, and creating opportunities. Learning to be the person I want to be should be a lifelong pursuit, right?

I spent a lot of time not being very active in creating the life I want, and thats the main thing I am changing in myself — I compromised and settled too much. Its my spirituality to define, discover, and become the person I want to be. I don’t get it from religion, that feels like a cop-out to me, though I can appreciate the benefits of following a roadmap. I just need something more creative, more personally ‘me’, so I listen to myself and others and take what I want and try and put it together. I think the key is the effort, to pay and give attention to yourself, your heart, your soul.

Right now I fill a lot of my free time with outdoor activities: hiking, running, biking, surfing, which are great for filling up time, and its gotten me in shape and made me feel good about myself, and well, its fun!

I do want someone to connect with, I miss having someone to kiss and to hold and to love, to touch. I miss being kissed and held and loved and touched. I worry that I am not ready yet; I think the worry is mostly a fear I get tempted to hide behind. The same fear that I hid behind when I settled and accepted living a life without exploring, pursuing, creating what I really wanted, so I am stretching and putting myself out there and trying to expand my circle of friends.

I am not feeling real confident though. I know thats not a good sign. You are supposed to be happy, confident, enthusiastic, witty, shiny, when meeting new people, right? The thing is, I know I am all those things, I just, well, sometimes I don’t feel it, I feel a little too human, or I worry it won’t come through easily enough — I find small talk boring, that doesn’t help. Sometimes my best witty comments are hours after the conversation, I hate that!!

I feel like there is so many new things I want to get into, new music, art, books, travels, adventures, but that I am deficient because its new to me right now, that somehow I should already have those things defined for myself, and that maybe I should figure all that stuff out before I go out there and find someone to share it with. But another part thinks that I want to share that newness with someone else, that there is a joy in learning new things about yourself through and with someone else.

I wonder how I will make that transition from ‘hey, how ya doing’ new friendness to hot, passionate kisses — its been a long time! Is it obvious when and how to do that? Or is it something you make happen? Does it even work that way? Its wierd that all those relationship transitions from acquaintance to lover I’ve had are somehow blurred in my mind. Hmm, maybe thats a bad sign? Or maybe thats how its supposed to go, a magical shift from one state to another? I probably shouldn’t think too much about it.

Its going to be fun to figure that out!

Leap of Faith

I was out at Bolinas early one monday morning, way out in front of the lagoon as the tide was the lowest I had seen it.  The waves were fairly small, but the surfers that were there: two guys in their late 60s and a couple others, were riding them forever, all the way to the beach on long left breaks.

I was catching them, but I was having trouble riding the left break — I’d just ride them straight, a much shorter journey.  I complained to one of the surfers about my inability to ride the line with my back to the wave, and he said, ‘Ya, it takes a leap of faith’.

There are a couple ways to ride the line as a beginner: you can either point your board at an angle, paddle and try to catch the wave at that angle, or you can catch the wave perpendicular to it and do a bottom turn.  The former is much easier, but not all waves are amenable to catching it like that, and the latter really does take a leap of faith, at least for a beginner like me, because I am concentrating on all the variables of catching the wave, standing up and turning in time to still be on the wave before it breaks. So much so, that I can’t really look at the wave much until after I turn.  And then riding with your back mostly to the wave is just harder, less visual queues, and less natural flexibility in that direction.

I have been thinking about the role of faith in my life, mostly because this whole idea of using my imagination to give life meaning seems to challenge the notion of faith, after all I am making up up or choosing stories.  Does it really make a difference whether we pretend something or truly believe it?

I think it depends on what we do: whether or not we can take a ‘leap’ and act on it.  Sometimes that leap is the effort of choosing a better story for ourselves.  Sometimes its doing things the ‘right’ way instead of the easy way.  Sometimes its choosing to follow hope instead of despair or apathy.

Its the choices and actions that matter. 

 I could simply stick to what works when catching that left breaking wave and ride it straight out, and I can have some fun doing that, but my rides won’t be as sweet, and I won’t progress as a surfer.  I am going to have to sacrifice a bunch of rides just trying to make that leap.  But its worth it.  When it works, there is nothing like it.  It is so exhilerating to take a risk on a blind step to find that not only did you not fall, but you’re flying.

Whatever

Whatever.

Lately, when I hear that word used, it sounds so insincere.  It had been a while since I had used it with that drawn out inflection, whAAAtEver, with the intent of driving home indifference and disdain.  But it had come up in conversation, and I was reminded of the fun that you can have with that attitude.  Except that the conversations that I noticed it used in were incongruous with the attitude – it was used deliberately to try and convey indifference to something that the person actually really did care about.  My six year old, with a budding appreciation for attitude, was enjoying its use that way.  Fun.  Indifference and detachment as a defense got me thinking about my own recent insights about my attachments, a topic that I have been stewing on for a few weeks.

I had never been too attached to things, and if anything, probably didn’t pay enough attention to my things as I should – so I started with that.  What would I do without my car?  Though named finally, it was replacable,  but replcement would be difficult and painful and I would have to give up some activities.  Hmm, I guess I had some attachments to those activities.  I need to go surfing? That doesn’t sound right.  I felt the need to surf go away.  My happiness was not connected to surfing, though I enjoyed it a lot.

I upped the stakes a little higher: what about my health?  If I wasn’t able to go outside and play, or felt sick, does that mean I couldn’t be happy? I wouldn’t want to give up happiness because I didn’t have my health.  That’s when I would need it the most! I felt a little lighter. 

I thought about my friends, new and old.  I had a strange attachment to my friends.  I have usually kept a few close ones, they would rotate in and out over time.  I didn’t feel like I had a lot of attachments to my friends, but that didn’t quite feel true.  When I was younger, I remember thinking I should travel and maybe live in another city for a while, or go see the world.  I remember worrying about giving up my friends.  The thing was, I ended up letting them recede into the background anyway.  I think at that time, I was attached to the belief that I needed those friends.  I guess I just had fear.

I thought about the friends I had now.  I knew they could easily go.  I felt a kind of clingy desperation slide away as my need for my friends dissolved.  I began to see that losing the attachments was not the same as losing the thing itself.  Rather than collecting and clinging to my need for friends, I could choose to be in the moment with them.  My relationships could be an act of will, a choice.  Loosening my attachments to my friends was not losing the friends, it was letting go of a neediness that wasn’t based on truth but fear.

Could I let go of my attachments to my kids?  That was a harder question.  My kids could be taken from me, or die…I could lose them. Could I recover from that? I knew I could, it happened all the time and in terrible ways to others who continued to live their lives, but it was still a hard question.  It helped a little to remember the realization that if my relationships weren’t based on needy attachment, then they would be maintained by a continuous choice.  That felt like a stronger, truer, more authentic way to experience relationships.  Its harder to take something for granted if you are continuously choosing it.  Its so easy to walk through life sleepily following a scripted role rather than deliberately staying present and aware.  My children weren’t requirements for my happiness, they don’t make me who I am.  I love them dearly, but they are not here to fulfill my needs.

Questioning my attachments was about changing a perspective, an attitude.  It wasn’t about taking on a false attitude of disdain or indifference: ‘whatever’, it was about seeing more of the truth.  Many of the things I had attachments to were not really under my control at all, and I could lose any of them at anytime.  If I lost those things, I would be ok — I may be disappointed, sad, or worse, but I would be ok, I would still be me. 

D brought up something she had heard recently, I can’t remember her exact wording but the gist was that there is freedom in stability.  That having roots gives us the strength to stretch for more.  At first it seemed to conflict with what I was learning about freedom found in losing attachments.  How do you get more attached than having roots?  Constructing a life that supports and comforts you and gives you enjoyment and strength and stability isn’t something to avoid for fear of developing attachments.  There is value in surrounding ourselves with people that we want to be around and things we enjoy and opportunities for the future —  we just need to remember that those things are not what make us who we are.  We should choose the things and people in our lives because it is best for us to do so, not because of the fear of what we would be or do without them.

Fear.

Whatever?

On the Side of the Road

I found God!  I had seen him a couple/few times before in the last few weeks, but it wasn’t until today that I realized who he was.

Sometimes a monday, sometimes a tuesday, there he was was in his white haired bearded goodness, standing along the side of the curving road welcoming us on our weekly journey over the hills to our coastal oasys with a smile and a wave.  The first time I saw him, he stuck out in my mind as a kind of thin Santa Claus, he had that jolly, happy look, but the thin thing was all wrong.  The next time, a week later on a different day, to see him again was a bit shocking.  He looked good though, this time with a colorful patchwork quilt vest and possibly matching hat, maybe even happier than the first time.

I love that he is there waving to us as we begin to descend into our regular soul talk sojourn.  I have been seriously trying to think of a gift I could bring him next time so I could stop and hand him something to make him smile, maybe shake his hand, say something, nod and drive away.  But now that I know he is God, I am a little reluctant to even take the same route again for fear that he won’t be there. I guess I can get over that, its enough to know that he stayed until I recognized him.

Though I’ve been loathe to admit it to myself, I’ve been looking for God for a long time.  I think the reluctance was there because I had seen and heard so many wrong versions of God, and I really wanted a God that was just right and without something just right, I’d rather believe that there wasn’t a God at all. 

 

I’ve recognized the power of belief and choice for a long time, but for awhile, I have been half-hearted and almost dead in my ownership of my spiritual beliefs.  Somehow I could say that a vision of the universe that could conspire with me was the more interesting view to take, more fulfilling, more rewarding, more responsible, more empowering, but I couldn’t take it all the way.  It was still someone elses idea that I was trying on back from 20 years go.  I would drag the notion out here and there, but I wasn’t living it and making it my own.

 

 

I’ve been looking to resolve this issue lately.  There have been a few key ideas that have helped push me back into the right direction.  The first one was a reminder that the universe is a loving place.  How do I know this?  I don’t!!  But I do believe in choice and the power of belief and it is way better to live in a universe that is loving and kind, whether I am here for cosmic entertainment or to learn something, or I am just a blur of molecular reactions carrying me through a moment of time.  

 

The second idea I got a good dose of this week, was the reminder to use the best story possible to give meaning and purpose and to motivate my vision of the future.  It’d be crazy to choose anything else!  Somehow I forgot that this was my own spiritual path and that I could choose to believe anything I damn well want!

 

And thats the key that has settled some spiritual angst for me and made me intellectually comfortable in my own spiritual skin again. 

 

Imagination.

 

There isn’t a right or wrong spiritual path, and there isn’t a static one-size-fits-all view thats going to do it.  Its a dynamic journey, with many  possible interpretations, and many different levels and flavors to everything that happens.  Todays best story may be replaced by a better one later, its the search for the best story we can think of that will leave us both fulfilled and hungry for more.

 

So maybe that kooky looking guy God will be there on the side of the road next week, smiling and waving me along my journey, and maybe he won’t.  If hes there, I hope I think of the right thing to give him, but if I don’t have something, I hope I at least feel brave enough to stop and get out of the car and shake his hand and say thanks.

Listening In

The other day I was mountain biking at Skeggs and I had a terrific accident.  I flew off the side of the single track trail over a cliff, doing a forward flip in the air and then a sumersault down a ravine.  Luckily I landed on a net of thick branches that had collected across a small stream.  I sat there for a bit, taking inventory, checking for missing skull fragments.  Miraculously, I was pretty much ok.  I knew I was in shock, my hands were shaking, my heart was racing, but I felt like laughing!

I had been practicing simple jumps along the trail.  I used to be pretty afraid of jumping and I was trying to get comfortable with it.  I had just traded places with my friend J, who egged me on.  I took the first jump we saw with gusto, and noticed an even better one right up ahead.  I scrambled to get in position, I was was going to fly. As I was getting closer I was starting to think that I should just let this one go.  I was coming at it at the wrong angle for how the trail turned ahead, and I was rushing it. I took the jump anyway.  I was flying toward the downhill side of the trail, which was turning into the hill.  I tried to angle myself toward the hill in the air but it wasn’t happening.  I landed in the detritus next to the trail and there was no way I was going to avoid going over the cliff edge where the trail turned.  I ducked over my bike to try and get my feet in front of me.  As I was floating through the air, I realized that I had no idea where the bottom was.

My knee was banged up and bruised, but not wrenched or anything.  I was able to climb out and ride most of the few miles back to our vehicles. My knee started hurting and swelled up pretty good, I was going to have to lay off sports for a while.

Later, I was pondering why this happened.  I really could have been seriously hurt.  I fell a good vertical 12-15 feet before my first landing and I didn’t have a helmet on and the fall could have been much worse.  I felt I needed a good talking to with myself.  What could I learn from this?  From a mundane point of view, I needed to be more careful and maybe practice jumping in a safer place, certainly I needed to stop forgetting my helmet.  I tried to look at it in a bigger picture.  Why was I being reckless? Should I use this as a wake up call?  Was I being reckless in other areas of my life?  I tried to look at it from a conspirational view of the universe: was I spending too much time doing the physical activities I would now be prevented from doing instead of working on other areas of my life?

I was telling my friend D about the story on the way to surfing the next day and she pointed out that it was cool that I had heard that warning voice before taking the jump.  That thought has been echoing around in my head since.  I had totally taken that for granted, but it WAS cool that I had had that voice, and that was an awesome reminder: to listen, to be more in tune with that little voice.  That little voice says a lot of things: it warns me of danger, it tells me to be patient when I am anxious, it tells me to be kind, to express my appreciation, to act spontaneously, to ask for forgiveness, it reminds me whats important and tells me whats not. It whispers the truth and is always there.  Its timing is impeccable.

Yes, I need to be more careful. I need to be more trustworthy with myself and to listen better, and to trust. Does the universe conspire with me?  I sure have a lot to be grateful for.

Opening Up and Out and Through

Sometimes you have to put down a thought and pick up a new one.  I thought I was going to work on a post about listening and trusting that little voice inside, and instead I am going to just listen to it, and get to writing about it later.

The question is: Once we’ve discovered our souls, how do we keep the door open?

I am feeling less angst about the answer to that question than I did before, mostly because I am appreciating the question more, because an answer lies in the questioning itself.  The answer is to love ourselves enough to live a life asking that question, right Rilke?  How do we keep the door open to our souls?  Keep looking for openings and use them; let love in, and let love out.

We can love ourselves by doing the most trivial things, it really doesn’t matter the things we do, just that we do them with intent.  Tiny little precious gifts, like some time to play, doing something special just for ourselves, something on purpose to nurture our soul.

Our soul needs attention, not greedy me, me, me attention, it needs someone to care about how its doing, to ask questions of it it, to just be with.  It needs to be able to express its own caring and to be heard and listened to.  It needs to be treated with kindness and respect, to be treasured and revered and valued.  It needs to be shared.

There is something about sharing that I didn’t know was so important.  Questions of the soul really are about as personal as it gets, right?  Its an internal road to travel with our souls.  So what is it about sharing?  Maybe its the giving and the willingness to be vulnerable? Maybe its sharing that demonstrates value?

I don’t know! But I think there may be something synergistic about sharing this journey.

I found an opening in my soul after I gave up on a lot of bullshit I was living and made a choice to wake up and do the right thing for myself.  It was the making of the right choices and the effort of doing the best I could for myself even though it meant giving up on my ego.  Being willing to look at the mess I had made and own it it and take responsibility.  To be forgiving and compassionate instead of choosing resentment and bitterness towards myself or who I was feeling hurt by.  It was giving up all the answers that I thought I had and accept that I really didn’t know myself as well as I thought, and that I really hadn’t been very nice or caring or respectful or loving of myself on purpose for a while.

I don’t know, I think that I really did give up on something. Its almost like I was keeping the door closed, and I just decided to finally stop struggling to keep it closed.  Maybe the answer to how to keep the door open is to quit trying to close it. 

Why Soul Talk?

A week or so ago I took it upon myself to rescue a poor misguided, ahem, soul, from her apparent inability to see an obvious conflict between who she really was (from my perspective) and how she wrote about certain things that were important to her,  namely things that had to do with the consideration of the soul, and some of her efforts to to care and nurture it.

I jokingly suggested soul talk desensitization training for both of us because I too get embarrased about talking about spirituality.  Even asking, let alone answering, obvious questions like ‘What do you really believe??’ is difficult for me.  Sharing my own piecemeal efforts to cobble together spiritual satisfaction is awkward and uncomfortable.

So this blog is intended to provide an anonymous place to talk about things related to my own personal soul. 

Wikipedia says that a soul, according to many traditions, is ‘the self-aware essence unique to a particular living being’.  That sounds ok, but its not saying much, so I am going to ad-lib.  I am going to go with a version of the soul that could be described as your ‘true self’, the who-you-really-are part of you that doesn’t change with your mood.  I’ll also go with a version that is involved or connected with the universe, or reality,  whatever you want to call it, in a way that is not necessarily tangible or physical.  I’ll leave it as vague as that, though feel free to chime in with your own personal definition of soul!!!

By spirituality, I mean the process or practice of discovering,  understanding,  and nurturing our souls. 

Whew! This is going great! I already feel embarassed!

–SoulTalkHeckler

 

Part II

I have decided to expand the scope a little bit to include other things that I am embarassed to talk about but shouldn’t be — the soul is big topic though, so maybe it include the other stuff I want to talk about.