You have your eyes on something. Something that is currently out of reach. It either take work, time, or money to get it. Time passes, you do the work, you get the money, you buy it… and then something totally unexpected happens: you don’t want it. You don’t want to use it…
Another version of the same thing, just in a different arena: you want a person to love you. You long for it. You court them. You buy them gifts, or do nice things to them. Then, when they say they love you and want you… the bottom falls out. You suddenly don’t want it.
But why would such a horrible thing be a daily occurrence?
I has happened to me recently. I wanted to buy a program that I really liked. I could see myself using it. I could see myself making money with it. Finally after about six weeks of waiting to get it, working extra to be able to pay for it… I didn’t want it. And I still don’t…
I looked into this today… looked under the hood, climb high enough on the vertical to see past present and future in one glance, tuned into the emotions that play out the drama… and I think I got it.
Having something out there, like a goal, like something to go for, something to live fore, is a strategy we use to avoid being in the present moment, and taking a real good look at our lives and at ourselves.
Why do we avoid it? Because it’s not pretty.
You have this imaginary persona, valuable, needed, important, someone who matters… or your version of that.
But the truth is that you don’t matter, and I include myself in this: I don’t matter.
I stayed alive and motivated for decades, telling myself that if I didn’t do what I was doing, then no one would do it. Then I got sick. And the world didn’t stop. The people who benefited from my work didn’t collapse, didn’t do anything: they found someone who filled the gap.
And that is true for all of us: we are not that important. And we are not that good, not that smart, not any of the things we fancy ourselves to be.
I picked up a Syracuse University newspaper today. There was a big picture on the front page with four people on it… and I could see from their body language, from their facial expression, that they feel they are very important, what they do is very important, they are better than the crowds, they serve, blah blah blah.
I get lots of comments that I don’t publish. People send me information, advice, that tells me: they fancy themselves really smart, and really knowledgeable… they are helping me out. Fixing my problems. They are important.
I delete their comments. I used to reply, give them a little sobering piece of my mind, but I don’t think that makes a difference. Now I just remove them from my mailing list.
After all, if they are so much better than me, if they feel above me, then I probably won’t benefit from them getting my emails, coming to my site. I hit the unsubscribe button… without any regret.
Now, how does this connect to the phenomenon mentioned in the beginning?
I noticed, on myself, that when I get hooked on some future, then I refuse to really work on it… lest I lose the only thing that is good in my life: hope.
I don’t live on the horizontal, goal and result oriented plane any more, but it take work, every day, to extract myself from it: the advertisements, the new products, the projects I work on get me hooked, time and time again.
Fixing, creating, getting rid of, making it, getting it… these are all verbs that belie that you are looking at some future as the good place, and the present moment as lacking, wrong, not the right place… “Once I get X, I’ll be happy, I’ll be accomplished, I’ll be fulfilled, I’ll be pretty, I’ll be well…” feel free to add your own way of making the present moment wrong.
When I manage to extricate myself, I can work, I can write, I can experiment, I can enjoy what I do… and when I enjoy what I do, I also enjoy my life.
In my one-year long financial cycle I am in the phase when I am supposed to be hooked, get careless, and go under. I have done it every year since I can remember… Weird, eh?
So, my only job is around this time, is to notice that I am hooked and get unhooked, as soon as I notice it. Not much gets done while I battle with this urge to go under… lol.
It looks very similar to alcoholism, drug addiction… anything that you think you have beaten, but you can’t beat it… it is always there, just below the surface, trying to run the show.
Have you ever seen ducks feet under the water line? The duck looks calm, collected, but there is feverish activity going on under the surface.
The best thing that can ever happen to me is to let go of, allow hope to drop. Hope is like hashish… like opium, like heroin, not that I have tried any of it… but I have connected to people who were under the influence… a total escape, a total absence from reality.
Kathryn, if this is a real question “why on earth would I want to be caught up in the drama?” is a good focus for observation. There is something still missing to authentically be in the vertical.
I have asked that question before, and what I got: it’s more interesting… which means, to me, that there is a lot more ego than not ego.
So the beauty of the present moment isn’t quite there. “There is more East to go young man…”
Good question, thank you for it. The other is: when I hear “I see myself in this article” my heart jump of joy. Thank you.
I see myself in this article. When I’m on the horizontal, which unfortunately is most of the time, I’m terribly depressed with the present moment and try to always put something out in the future to look forward to so I can bear my life.
When I’m on the vertical, the present is fine exactly as it is and I don’t need to have something out in the future to look forward to in order to bear my life. Whether there’s something out in the future or not makes no difference.
Life is incomparably better on the vertical, but I keep falling back onto the horizontal and staying trapped in it. Which seems totally ridiculous when I could instead choose to be on the vertical. I many times see myself getting swallowed up in drama and at the moment I start to get swallowed up, the moment when I can choose to turn my back on the drama and move to the vertical, I find that I very emphatically and knowingly choose the drama. I’m definitely choosing it. That makes no sense. Why on earth would I want to be caught up in the drama and so terribly depressed?