A few fleeting thoughts. (I see the irony, yes, I do!)
Expression can never hope to capture experience. In fact, it is wholly incapable of conveying experience, or maybe only a fraction of it. Here’s the clincher, though. Experience is fleeting, while expression has some degree of longevity. (Even if it’s only an individual voicing her thoughts to the void. And if she writes it out someplace, it persists longer… in her mind and in the minds of those who read it.) Here’s where expression does the individual disservice. It grants permanence to something ephemeral. It makes an experience into Truth, whereas what it is is creativity. It’s the mind connecting the dots, drawing a picture, casting a passing moment on to stone, paper, canvas, film.
If the individual and her readers (or listeners, etc.) know expression for what it is (i.e. creative energy), they can partake in it, savor it, bless it, or not. However, when they construe it as Truth, they grant it solidity, a lasting relevance. And they are forever imprisoned by it.
What if thinking and doing were both the same phenomenon… unspooling?
It often seems like there is such a strong preference for doers, the ones who don’t sit and think (and/or talk) endlessly, or fall into an “analysis paralysis” coma, but get off their behinds and make things happen. And yet, I wonder if thinking and doing may not essentially be the same thing, a kind of “unspooling” from the same ball of yarn. For, if your thought and doing patterns both draw from the same bank of ideas, there may not be an actual difference between the two. While one manifests in something you could possibly see with your eyes, the other is confined to an imagined universe. And they may be two forms of the same pattern.
Now, if thinking or doing are spontaneous actions, seemingly drawn out of nowhere (or space), fully responsive to the place and time, then what emerges may be inspired, unique and novel. And perhaps that’s what we can call simply being, or simple being, or creative, alive being.
As someone who writes her heart out, I sometimes wonder if I may be giving an altogether incorrect impression about my life, my family and relationships, my loving partnership.
We see our lives as perfect not because they are perfect in a literal sense, but because we have swallowed them whole… and now, all perfections and imperfections reside fully within us.
My partnership is perfect because it is complete, and I have oriented myself entirely to it. My relationship with my parents is perfect because I have imbibed it whole. My relationship with my sister is perfect because I have eaten her up, fully. Indeed, none of these exist outside of me.
Meaning, there is nothing objective about any of this. It is entirely subjective, so what you see (through my writings) is what I see.
Wrote this a year ago on Facebook, and I thought I’d share it here as well.
The last couple of posts of mine have been… a little sombre, sober, sad. It is important to understand, though… they were written in a particular state of mind. And no state of mind is constant. This lockdown has also been a period of beauty, enthusiasm, loving joy, humor, even bliss. And there used to be a smidgen of guilt as well. For not contributing, for not sewing masks, for not supporting, for not donating, for not volunteering, for not being enough… in any way, in many ways.
Not that any of this is a competition. And I have never been a good competitor. I hardly ever feel invested in an end goal, a final prize… not even myself. This idea of doing something/anything as a means to become more evolved, more benevolent, more generous, more wise… doesn’t fully gel with me. I AM evolved, benevolent, generous and wise. I am also fearful, anxious, stubborn, and detached. And everything I do emerges from this unique, multi-colored space.
I have enjoyed this lockdown period immensely but I have also been rattled in strange, little ways. I have experienced dull evenings of scary, gaping emptiness, and I have savored blissfully cool, sunny mornings when my garden smiles back at me, and little seedlings happily unfurl their true leaves on the bathroom window sill. I have happily eaten every dish my creative husband has rustled up in our kitchen. I have had rough nights with dreams of chaos, restlessness. And then there is that rare morning when you wake up feeling weightless, so light and transparent, like a feather.
(I tend to believe that a LOT of how I feel is directly linked to the state of my digestion. So I attend to it as best as I can.)
My husband is a beautiful mirror, meaning he reflects what he sees without projecting. When you are a “blank canvas” type of personality, it is immensely helpful to have a partner who doesn’t splatter paint all over you. Perhaps that’s why this period of forced enclosure has not altered the quality of space in the relationship.
Contrary to what anyone (friend, partner, parent, media, president, prime minister, queen) says, our experience of life is fully and unequivocally our own, and it is an internal phenomenon. Life actually occurs on the inside, so no one can tell you what THAT is all about, and that includes the pandemic/Corona experience also.
