Choose Life – Yours

A Crossroads
Artist: Stephanie Frostad 1965

If we don’t start where we are, we can’t get to where we’re going. It’s just that simple. Got to be here, to get there, even if we don’t know where there is.

I’ve been completely sucked in by the pressures of the collective culture; that thing that creeps in around the edges, sneaks up and sucks the life out us. It’s happened so many times, in so many ways, you would think I’d be on to its wily ways by now. The film builds up over the eyes, clouds cover the consciousness, and awareness to its diabolical character suddenly vanishes. How does that happen?

Like so many things in life, it happens when we’re not paying attention. It happens when we stop being mindful. Life seems to happen in the spaces between our hopes and dreams and the day-to-day activities in which we participate.

It is unrealistic to expect ourselves to be mindful during every waking moment, though it’s an admirable ideal toward which to reach. (If, however, we are reaching, we are not being mindful.)  Our culture slips a film of perfection over our eyes when we are not paying attention. It would have us believe that getting what we want, even if it’s living a mindful life, is as easy as deciding to do it. Remaining far out of sight are such things as discipline and practice. Patience and persistence.

We were born with free will, which too often we choose not to use. We’d rather pay someone else to help us lose weight; follow the latest guru to develop a connection to the spiritual world; live off the life force of another to achieve our dreams. Why else would Oprah be so famous, or  how-to-be-a-millionaire books flying off the shelves? Like a connection to those people or things will somehow infuse us with some magical potion that will turn us into them, or something like them.

The only life force we have any sort of control over is our own. We’d fare far better if we’d tune into our own source of guidance and energy, exercise our own will power, practice mindfulness, learn patience with ourselves and persistently pursue communion with the spirit guide that lives within us. Let go, again and again of the reaching for, the grabbing onto, the avoiding and evading and tune in to. Turn down the volume on the external world. Turn up our attune-ing mechanism on the inner world.

© Dorothy Sander 2013