Dear Tom:
This weekend I was thinking about our discussions on the beach, especially about your concept of putting positive thoughts out into the air and allowing these thoughts to seek their solution in space instead of holding my anxieties in, worrying constantly about the future. Of course, thinking about the beach also brought back thoughts of the ocean and swimming amongst the waves and tides. Salt water makes one more buoyant, and if you relax you always float to the top. When I was a lifeguard and swimming instructor in one of my early lives. (We go way back to the South Y in Montgomery, Alabama for this one). I used to try to convince my young swimmers that the water was their friend. Water doesn’t want you to sink. It is not neutral, it cares whether you swim in it or drown in it. It wants you to swim and every drop that surrounds your body is pushing you to the top, so you can float and glide across the surface.
Life is not neutral either. It does care and it is not indifferent. Life wants and intends for us to lead a full life for ourselves. We are surrounded by the Holy Spirit, Life Force, Spirit of God, it matters little what you call it. What matters is that we open ourselves to receive it, that we address it, and that we move in the direction that it seeks to move us. So like my concerns and hopes you suggest I let go out into space and see where they take me, perhaps it is my whole being that needs to be like a rubber raft on the ocean or a kite in the air. I need to let go off the line and see where life takes me, like the wind or the tide.
Easier said than done my friend, but certainly worth my examination, and worth at least loosing the grip on the tether. Webb
Dear Webb,
How well I remember our walks on the beach in South Carolina. A wonderful time. And the conversation you refer to, another slant on it is that we tend to attract to ourselves the energy that we “put out there.” If we spend a lot of time in a “victim” space, or complaining about how awful life is, or how unlucky we are, we’ll simply attract more of those attributes to ourselves. Alternatively, being joyous, grateful, happy, generous will attract more joy, reasons to be grateful, happiness and two-way generosity.
We just spent the last 3 days in a training. One of our teachers, a brilliant physicist with mastery in several other areas (art, music, etc) and a Sufi, shared several perspectives from physics that relate to what you said in this most recent entry of yours. One was that the force field from the future is much stronger than that from the past … if we allow it. But most of us live in our past. We make decisions based on past experience, and we define our attitude based on how we have been in the past. Most of us have heard Einstein’s statement, paraphrased as “The definition of insanity is continuing to make the same choices and expecting different outcomes.” But just as you said, relaxing into the unknown of the future and trusting it from a loving place will bring new experiences beyond out wildest expectations.
Easier said that done? Maybe so. But a couple hints from our teacher that may help:
1. Un-memorize those emotions and choices that don’t serve me but rather contribute to my present self-identity (fear, anger, judgment are a few examples).
2. Hold new identities (those we evolve through) – even good ones – lightly to remain fluid. Otherwise, they will become part of our new identity from the past, limiting our capacity to learn from the future.
3. Hold great value for surprises. Surprises come from the future. If we find our days don’t have any surprises, we are living in the past.
Finally, our teacher shared an old Sufi saying: “Let me die to who I think I am as often as possible.”
Your friend
Tom