1 a comment
2 two statements 3 notions 4 what you might like to do 1 a comment A number of people, from a number of backgrounds, over a number of years, have given me the exact same advice. When I hear something over and over and from different sources, especially trusted sources, I pay special attention. Is this something that I believe or would be smart to believe? Each time, the advice has been given to me candidly, as a sort of secret aside. It comes, I guess, from how the advice-givers have lived their own lives. It is, I think, them suggesting to me how I might want to more easily, more enjoyably, live mine. Their counsel: expect little from life and you will not be disappointed. I take their guidance as well-meaning. They are trying to spare me from unnecessary difficulty; from sadness; and, I think, from pain. Some of the sadness and/ or pain that they themselves may have experienced. I have received this same guidance from those religious; from those stoic, atheistic, pragmatic; from those who are good friends, other friends, and from acquaintances. And I have seen, often, how this way of believing, this story, is lived out in their lives. It is, in my observation, lived out by those who have decided to make do. Nothing wrong with or against them. It is a way of living, a story, an understanding, belief. Theirs, and it works for them. Just not mine. I do not want to "make it through" life. I do not want only to survive, only to endure my years. Certainly, I want to survive; more than survive, I want to live healthy, strong, and long. But, mostly, I want to live. To feel, to know, my connection with Life, my relationship with the universe, at least sometimes. Perhaps, often. I want to be a conscious, active part of my life; of life; of Life. To contribute to the greater of It. Have I been/ am I/ can I be successful every minute, hour, day, or year? No! No. But still I have known/ know, and have tasted; and gone/ go after; and sometimes, sometimes often, experience it. Connected. Am I asking too much of myself, of life? I think, rather, that often, too often, I ask too little. Perhaps we ask too little. Too little of ourselves/ life/ God/ Source/ the Universe/ Life. This is what LukeyoutheU is about: asking for life, and living it. It tries to find, searches for, goes towards, discovers, realizes, creates. Our individual paths are sometimes clear and wide open; sometimes an easy amble across a rolling field; a well-marked albeit twisty road; sometimes, our paths are, or certainly seem, lost; sometimes we are lost, hidden in jungle deep; caused to have to go up mountains steep; or face seemingly endless desert sands; sometimes, our paths take us through sparsely, or peopled, places; over gentle hills; through pastures; or across streams. Often, I follow my path pretty much alone; that may be the case for you, too. At other times, maybe for you, it is for me, it is with others, close friends, or close family, or teachers wise, that I walk. Sometimes our paths are found only, that is, they are decided upon, only by us individually, in the dark. By us alone. A step or many steps taken without the assuredness that our next footfall will be on solid ground; or indeed that our feet have anywhere to land on at all. Whatever the setting of your path, your path is yours and yours alone to follow/ make. Go always with others, on the outside, and you are still making your own path, just with others around. Throw a hissy fit, cast yourself to the ground, complain silently or out loud, refuse to take another step, take steps backwards, it is all the same: still the earth keeps spinning with you happening to be on it. You are becoming more of who you have made/ chosen yourself to be no matter which way you do or do not go. You cannot stay in the same place, be you were, even when it seems you have. You. Have. Moved. Changed. Perceive it or not, you are always moving/ changing, always being moved/ changed, riding the earth as it turns. It changes; and you change on it. With it? You are on your path; you cannot leave your path. Like it or not. You can like it and take the responsibility and opportunity that comes from being a conscious being; or not; for being on your path, having the circumstances you do, or not; still you have it. You still have a path. You are moving, even with your path, every day. Discovering and creating it with your every step. Even also by standing still. You get farther, you go further, by accepting/ embracing/ choosing your next step(s). What are you to do? Even more, what are you doing and going to do? 1 a comment 2 two statements 3 notions 4 what you might like to do story number 5 I was going to put these paragraphs at the top of the page but they seemed too much. They are not for everybody. As you have scrolled down, made your way to them, are here, it occurs to me that what is below may be for you. Stories are how I typically process, and find/ decide, the meaning(s) in life; and, maybe, possibly, how you do, too. I realize I propose this idea elsewhere on this site. I write it again here to help you perhaps better hear and more greatly consider the idea. To make sure that you hear it. This repetition is meant to strongly recommend to you to take care in the stories you watch and create and remember and repeat. Great care. Take care in what you tell yourself, and others. What you do and do not do. Especially in the stories and actions you repeat. Stories can, and do, come from anywhere. The ones that most speak to me (that give me life, that quicken my spirit and help me expand) are the ones I pay attention to. Remember and sometimes tell. If I repeat a story often enough, live through it with feeling again and again, I find that it becomes a part of me. One of my collection of beliefs. Your stories, the ones you have been told that you remember, unconsciously and consciously; the ones you tell yourself again and again, especially your automatic response and go-to phrases; these have directed and shaped, currently direct and shape, your life. The ones you meditate on, repeat, find effective to at least some degree today, direct and shape you now. Guide you, shepherd you, into who you are becoming. They do not control who you are, who you become, but they surely do influence. Listen to what you yourself think, and ask: do I find any correlation between my stories and my experience of life? Casual correlations that are physical (example: I forgot to roll up my backseat windows; after the thunderstorm the backseat of my car is soaking wet) are pretty easy to understand and explain. Causal correlations that are relational (example: I forgot her birthday and now it seems she "forgot" mine) are also not usually hard. Causal correlations that are both nonphysical and nonrelational, that are by nature almost always considered individual, idiosyncratic, non reproducible, and/ or undocumented or undocumentable—now those are about impossible to explain. For others to believe in. An example that actually happened from my own life: I was sitting in a Palm Springs McDonald's on the north side of town, almost entirely out of money, not exactly sure where my next meal would come from. At the time, I was living the life I thought/ believed it was the best for me to live; this life of bicycling around the desert, thinking, being, mulling, mentally growing but not having always places to sleep, made about zero sense to nearly everyone else. While eating a Sausage McMuffin, then sold for the outrageously low price of $1, looking around I saw a fifty dollar bill, folded, in the middle of the floor. Seven (I counted them) tables had a direct line of sight of the bill, if those who sat at them paid attention; four of the tables were peopled, singles, pairs, families. Others, eaters walking between the rows of tables, stepped over the bill on the floor to walk to tables in the back. I waited, and watched, for twenty minutes. Was anyone going to notice the money on the ground? No one saw, or seemed to see, the $50. After the twenty mintues, a reasonable amount of time, I thought, for whomever had dropped it to realize their loss and return, I got up, walked over to the bill, stepped on it, and dragged it under my shoe back to my table. As surreptitiously as I could. No one saw anything, paid attention to them, or at least said anything. I put the bill in my pocket. Waited another ten. Eaters-now-filled left, new eaters came. No one said or looked for anything. I figured that whoever had lost had no idea they had it; or where; or decided that returning to retrieve it was a lost cause. I decided at that point that the money was mine. I could have turned it in to the employee at the counter, or the manager, I suppose; but I suspected that the money would go no further than that person, and that whoever dropped it would have come back by then had they needed/ wanted/ had faith that it was still there. (I decided on these rules/ guidelines after having discovered $17 in mixed denomination dollar bills at the bottom of a swimming pool at The Mirage in Las Vegas (then swanky and existing), circa 2002(?). I dutifully turned in the cash to the lifeguard in his chair. It dawned on me hours afterwards that the likelihood of that money being handed over by the guard to his manage, the manager caring enough to keep records and pay attention to it, the hotel visitor who lost the money returning to the pool in a timely fashion before the hotel forgot it to retrieve it, was about zero. I'd found and continue to find money on the ground to this day, including $700 at Macy's, $220 at The Depot in SF, a $20 bill blowing on a side street, caught under a tire, which I saw the dance of and later retrieved after talking with my boss and she leaving, etc. The Macy's money I turned into the story and waited the required three months to later as the dropper did not; The Depot money I waited for thirty minutes but no one came/ claimed it. Besides: the person who lost the money should have/ could have been more careful in the first place. Some decisions, accidents, many, most have repercussions. Perhaps those folks will be more careful in the future. Or not. Whatever you do when you find money on the ground is yours to figure out. My process makes sense to me. Anyway, at that McDonald's on East Vista Chino, my half hour wait was done. I needed the money; believed/ felt that God / Source / Universe had provided it for me. Why not from seeing, getting, waiting after getting a $50 bill from the floor at a relatively busy McDonald's? A coin found in a fish from the lake, so to speak: money "fished out"/ found when needed.*) LukeyoutheU offers what I think/ find are useful and good stories. Take some, all, or none of them, as you wish. Of course. Make them yours if they seem useful and good to you; but, I suggest, only if they seem useful and good to you. The idea of this adventure called LukeyoutheU, the reading and listening and pondering you might do while on/ in it, is to assist you in seeing; and making; and creating; your life differently, and better. And not yours alone. To make it clear: differently always proceeds better. You will have to change, think, and do differently than you have done before to get to/ make better. fundamental *A not-so-oblique reference to Matthew 17:24-27. (BibleGateway.com) stories |
