Category: Awareness

In your own life, in your culture, in the things you read about or talk about or think about – how much has to do with what’s outside of you? What things, if we could just have them or be them or do them, would solve our problems?

Enough money
More money
The right job
The right product
The right strategy
Less stress
More time
More sex
Different sex
A different spouse
Any spouse
Kids
No kids
Less clutter
More stuff
A bigger house
Any size house
A decent place to live
A new car
A childhood that didn’t suck
Better laws
Better ways to get everyone to follow all the laws
Jobs for everyone
Universal healthcare
A different president
A different body
A different life
A different world

The cosmic joke is that none of these things can solve our problems. None of these things can actually make us happy.

The way we feel isn’t caused by anything outside of us. Nothing outside of us can change the way we feel.

What we feel is caused by what we think.

Our experience is created by our thoughts and the meaning we attach to those thoughts.

The cosmic winning lotto ticket at the end of the rainbow that we all have, at all times, is that there will always be a fresh thought, and we can always attach new meaning to it. We can be happy from the inside out.

Last night, minutes after I fell asleep, the security alarm blared me awake. I shot out of bed, intensely alert and quickly running through the next best course of action. Normally, my husband would be the one to go downstairs and do recon. He’s a 6’4 blackbelt Army veteran, matching me in fearlessness but better equipped physically to confront predators. Right now, though, he’s a 6’4 blackbelt with a broken leg and still recovering from the surgeries that added a lot of metal to his frame. So I went down first and was hit with freezing air at the bottom of the stairs.

The front door was open. I know I checked the locks before going up to bed, I check the locks every night at least two or ten times, both doors, and maybe a few more times after that. Mama bear has two precious babies to protect. Did someone pick the locks? Did someone have a key? Oh my god, we never changed the locks after buying the house. How could I have let that slip?

We checked the house to ensure it was predator-free. My husband tried to reassure me that we were safe, the kids are safe, the house is safe. With each word, my anger combusted. Now, I was not only running through every possible horrible scenario I could think of, I started to go down the list of everything my husband had ever done wrong and all the ways he continued to trespass against the sanctity of our secular marriage.

I said some horrible things, and in response to his silence, I said much more. I was in an intensely closed mood.

Moods are usually evaluated somewhere on the spectrum between positive and negative. You can be in bad mood, a good mood, a meh mood. This judgement or valuation can cause all sorts of problems – panic, discomfort, anxiety, fear – especially since we can’t ultimately control our mood states.

If we let go of the judgment, we might instead begin to experience our moods like an aperture. In some mood states, we feel open and expansive. In others, we feel closed.

Last night, after the alarm screeched me from sleep, I was in a very closed mood. This afternoon, during lunch with my husband, my mood was open and I didn’t blame him for anything. Just the awareness of feeling closed can be enough to open the aperture and experience a different mood state. Always, the aperture opens and closes and always opens again.

I’ve been considering an experiment in which I do only what I want to do for some period of time. Other than the riskiness of such a seemingly indulgent approach, the most difficult prospect is actually the challenge of knowing what I want to do.

“What do I want in this moment” is not the same as “I don’t feel like xyz” or “I want to just lay here with my head under the covers and not get up all day.” I mean something very specific by the idea of want. Want must have something feeling of a spark, inner wisdom, maybe joy, or silence, something that feels right.

I’m not sure of the specifics beyond these vague notions, mostly because I haven’t spent much time following or listening to or even being aware of this feeling. I supposed I’m currently a stranger to what I actually want, beyond thought. A stranger to who I am beyond thought. I’ll try following the spark for a day and see where it takes me.