The older I get the more I am coming to understand that life is just a chain reaction of events. All that has happened in my life is a direct result of something that has happened prior to that. It is important to remember that this includes my thoughts, desires and choices. The logic behind this is that things like choice and will power, even though they do exist, they are nothing more than the consequences of what I have been through beforehand.
It is in the cultivation of coincidence that reality rises above fear and fantasy inches closer to reality than one ever dreamed. It is through reason that we can’t allow ourselves to detach from the past. I first started to understand this a couple of weeks ago. I was stuck. I had no creative motivation whatsoever. I wasn’t willing to let go of the past as much as I liked to lead on.
It was in this state of stuckness that I did what I thought was the reasonable thing to do and evaluated my process with the rigidity of classical thought. Why was I not able to finish this or that? I had done my due diligence on the research and there I was still stuck. I had so many ideas running through my head that I couldn’t descend from one message to the next. All this process did was stress me out even more; I was so stressed that I couldn’t think straight.
Finally after a couple of hours, I got up from the desk and walked away, with little to no thought about what I should write, I felt like giving up and I did, in every sense of the phrase. I threw reason by the wayside. I had to detach myself from all of the past ideas that I felt were worth writing about. I woke my child from his nap and we went for a hike to explore a new experience.
As we talked and laughed about childish things, we came upon a river where he was more than happy to throw rocks into—without much thought—for hours on end. The serenity in this maneuver alone got the momentum flowing. The water was curving at a crawl and I decided to pick up a few flattened stones and weave them across the ripples of this river. He has seen me do this numerous times but hadn’t yet quite developed the motor skills to actually make the stone skip across the water. This time around it was my goal to be patient and allow his creative process the time it needed to come around.
This time around I shared with him the knowledge of how to skip a stone with the angle in which you release the stone and the follow through which one must achieve to get the rock to spin. It must be noted that follow through is one of the most critical aspects in every facet of life. He slid the rock out of his hand at a slight angle and the stone skipped gently across the water. He was so ecstatic and happy that it almost brought me tears.
The romantic parallel of thinking came rushing over me like a river. It skipped across me like the stone he just threw, it skipped passed my creative process, followed by a few times across my heart and then it sunk directly into the soul of me. In the metaphorical sense, I was the river and he was the stone.
It was in the moment of stuckness that the solution to my problem seemed so very important, it was reasoned to sit back and stew on the problem. Then as I thought about it more this stuckness when allowed time, will assume its true importance, the importance of figuring itself out. In the rigid evaluation I made, it seemed like a gargantuan matter. Maybe it was, but by allowing my mind to be stuck in the place it was without overthinking, well that was when the problem started to become more and more diminutive. The less my mind thought about it, the more my mind let go of reason and it started to move freely and naturally towards the resolution. The lesson learned is that stuckness need not be sidestepped because it is the precursor of total understanding.
It is when I took a different approach towards a new avenue of experience that my creative wheels started rolling again. It was in this moment that I started to understand things and see things with more clarity that I finally understood what it felt like to be a teacher. In my profession, I find it easy to be a teacher, but it takes a lot of work to allow that to translate over into your own personal life. I guess maybe sometimes we do ignore our own premise of self-growth and put all of that focus on the burner of our professional career.
What I learned from this experience is that if you can’t explain something in a way that even a child could understand, it is because you do not fully understand what you are talking about. The greatest teachers are able to convey complex messages with ease. Poor teachers cannot accomplish this and it would be wise to realize that they must become students first.
And that is exactly what we all are; we are all students of life, figuring this thing out as we go. Some of us yearn to learn, some of us give in to all of the distractions of life, but we will always find ourselves stuck at some point or another, and it will not do you any good to become frustrated in that stuckness, instead ride it like the wave it is and you’ll see the beauty that follows, all you need to do is allow time and patience their deserved chance at making the problem disappear.
You must suffer at playing the fool before you become the master, because if you cannot explain it to a fool, you are not a master.
BeLove © 2018
Barstool Buddha 