Thursday, November 1, 2012

On Being Right Where I Am

I have been discovering the virtues of mindfulness for quite some time. I define this as the art of observing what's on my mind but not attaching to it. Watch your worries and let them pass.

For those of us Westerners uncomfortable with Eastern practices of meditation, or who associate contemplation with religion and all the baggage that institution conjures, we define this practice as metacognition: thinking about your thinking.

This practice of non-attachment has done wonders for my normally unquiet mind, where I was wont to grab on to every grievance, wrong or seizure of self-doubt and worry it to death.

I don't miss these obsessions with what is only, after all, a passing thought.

But another piece of the mindfulness puzzle still eludes me. It is the idea that wherever I am, that's where I'm supposed to be. I think this means that any situation provides an opportunity for learning. I like that idea, in principle, but that my brain apparently thinks otherwise. Or is it my ego that has grabbed hold and won't let go?

After all, I am the person who has always known she could change the world. Yet, no one else seems to be signing on for that experience, wherein, I save them. I used to receive a modicum of satisfaction in sheltering my impressionable children from experiencing the hardships of life. Yet, as young adults, even they seem impervious to my magical incantations to wish away harm.

So either I have failed greatly in what only I have long understood as my God-given mission, or I have been focused on the wrong goal. Perhaps, in distracting myself to believe I can save everyone else, I have unconsciously distracted myself from appreciating that things don't always turn out the way you want them to. That, perhaps, bad things exist for good reasons - like teaching us to cope in the game of life.

Trying hard to appreciate that, in this moment, I am in the right place, even if it is different from where I have always thought it should be. And that learning to be here, now, IS the lesson, despite my unsalved ego's insistence that I have somehow failed.

Just watching now, to see if I can allow the wind to carry away my attachment to being the one who protects others. And accept that I am right where I should be.