It’s tough to get moving after not having moved for a while. It’s equally tough to start living after not having lived for a while.
Watching other people live is not living. Wanting, wishing, hoping for….these are the indications of a view from the bleachers and not from the playing field. Telling ourselves how other people should live (i.e. what plays they should engage) does not in any way indicate that we know how to live our own lives.
When we’ve been sitting in the bleachers for most of our lives, we fool ourselves into believing that this IS our life – watching, wishing, hoping – and feeling pumped or pounded depending on what we’ve observed. I can’t even bring myself to use the word ‘witness’ since it carries too great a sense of enlivenment relative to ‘observe’.
Wherever did we learn that the best thing to do…the right thing to do…was to do nothing? How did we come to be so passive in our own lives….so tied to the flow of the wave that we have lost ourselves as the unique droplet of water that we are? Are we not still water without the wave?
It takes a lot to get moving after having been still for so long. It takes a lot to be ‘water’ when we have held ourselves for so long to be only part of the ‘wave’. It takes a lot to engage… to step up to the plate of the game of our own lives… when we’ve spent so much of that life sitting in the bleachers, watching life go by. And yet, if we don’t find inside ourselves what it takes for us to ENGAGE, we will wonder where our life went – and the time that longing relies on will have run out.
There’s a big difference between being on the field and being in the bleachers. We can get hurt. We’ll likely get dirty and gritty. We may even get sweaty and smell bad! But in the end, is that not what the game demands of its best?
One last thought: it’s tough to keep playing when we don’t win. Yet, it is in those moments that we determine the degree to which we love the game, for its own sake. Do we define the game or are we defined by it?
Breathing is good…..
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