The Long and Short of it All

As a child, I may well have been described as ‘precocious’ and ’strong willed’. Never one to agree to anything just to appease, or to embrace pretence for peace over discovery (despite the likely chaos to follow) I was also considered by some to be ‘difficult’ (translation:  a pain in the ass!).

Truthfully? Not much has changed. Now in my 70th year, my clarity has only gained intensity rather than mellowed or become faded and undefined. Good/bad? Right/wrong? I have not a clue – I only know that to live otherwise would be my end.  And it would seem I am still pretty good at being a pain in the ass!

I am discovering that the longer I live, the shorter my attention span becomes.  It would also seem that I have further reduced what little ability I had to tolerate the irrelevant and the mundane.

It now takes a lot for me to be drawn to engage. The conversation is the key: how big, how far and how deep can it go? After all, the quality of our lives is ultimately determined by the conversations we are willing to entertain.  Simple, really, when you think about it.  The things we talk about become the boundaries that frame the expression of our potential.  We are either bound by or freed through the conversations we embrace.  There is great magic in the moment when the conversations we are having inside ourselves match the ones we are having out loud with another.

At this time in my own evolution, the desire to continue to evolve and become is greater than it has ever been. As more and more, science challenges our long-held thinking on who and what we are – as human beings – and the nature of what we call ‘reality’, my tethers to matter become more tenuous…. thinning and losing their hold on my own imagination for new ways of considering my Life, my ‘reality’ and the world of my own choosing.

The longer I live to explore and discover beyond those things held as ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ by the vast majority of the population of our species, the less interested I am in all that such ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ offer to me, that I might invest mySelf in claiming as my own. You can well imagine that when habit and history lose their grip on the creation of a future, more and greater opportunities present with the potential for provocation to a larger expression of Self.

The deeper the dive, the greater the pressure to bear and the more life-threatening the conditions may become. As such, the greater the likelihood that the ‘pack’ will thin… and more sparse and less congested will be the place in which we might find ourselves. For some, it feels life-threatening to say ‘no’ to what history and habit have long dictated as a way of life. For many, there is safety in the pack-mind and knowing that at least in some way – if not necessarily any optimal way – pack-mind does allow for predictability. Perhaps the dictum that ‘predictability equals safety’ has long been an illusion to which we cling, in hopes of a better tomorrow. The problem is that we don’t live in tomorrow, we live in the ‘now’ of the moment we’re in. It is in that moment – and only that moment – that anything of any value can take place. Short is the time remaining to us to wake up and smell the coffee of a new potential to be claimed.

The great uncertainty that is now gaining momentum also brings with it the collapse of existing boundaries – and whatever outcomes may enter our ‘reality’. Coronavirus. Pandemic. Quarantines. Shut-downs. Scarcity. Risk. Threat. Welcome to the newly-presenting threshold for measuring our capacity to fear! I sometimes wonder: who invents these things? Not for a nano-second do I believe these are random and accidental incursions into the redirection of our lives. Pack-mind will get you pack-mind outcomes. Perhaps we would do well to think for ourselves. Lost in the frantic blah blah of it all is the forgotten simplicity of what can redirect it all: immune system strength (which is profoundly debilitated by fear); wash your hands; and keep your hands away from your face. Those voices… those carrying that simple message of remaining healthy… are the few, the quiet and the ones lost in the frenzy of pack-mind.

Time is short. Not because the world is going to end or a Zombieland reality is about to present but because any moment wasted on NOT turning your attention inward to explore the core of your own Being is another moment lost to the pack-mind. The chains that bind are of our own creation.