There is nothing quite like those moments when the cumbersome clouds of thought pollution break long enough for you to take a breath of logic and reason…. When you can catch a glimpse of the road ahead and you find that it’s fucking beautiful and vast and blossoming with voluptuousness of your own potential.
When you think to yourself... "What the hell am I suffering for?"
These moments are fleeting, and maybe only last for the length of the song that’s playing on the radio (wait… radio?) but every one of them brings you closer to a clear, cloudless morning. A realization. An epiphany. Sometimes that cloud breaks over a cup of cheap, black, Nescafe coffee while listening to Radioheads “In Rainbows”. Sometimes they break while wading in crocodile filled waters to take photographs of bathing elephants.
Sometimes it takes a complete stranger from Utah to sit down next to you at a café in Kathmandu and shake the horizon clear by reminding you of where you came from.… ...... And sometimes these moments just take a shot from your blind spot and you’re left feeling a little…. D i z z y. After all, when you’ve been caged up for so long in dreams, walking on solid ground can be a little bit …t r i c k y . The truth is, some of us are F E E L E R S. [Way.Too.Much.Feeling]
= suffering And this makes most things in life more difficult than they have to be.
When others would normally raise a brow and walk away from a toxic situation, we sit around and try to figure out how to get everyone out without any emotional casualties. Even if it means we stay behind and burn. WE TEND TO GET STUCK. Lost. Sometimes we get too attached to the potential of a situation instead of the potential of our own selves…
and potential yet unrealized is little more than a day dream. Hence the cloudiness. The dream haze. Dreaming through the busy streets of the waking world is a cocaine train straight to misery and disappointment.
But How do we break the surface of our own self-sacrifice? How do we begin to hold our own suffering equally with the suffering of others? HOW DO WE SEE CLEARLY WHEN OTHERS ARE BLINDED BY THEIR OWN BLOOD? Well, sometimes you can just keep going, and let these little cloud breaks add up to clear skies. The storm always passes.
But, I am learning [the hard way, of course] that the most important thing to remember is what makes you beautifully unique. Find your honest and authentic self, which may be buried deep down, below layers of societal expectations and media influence, in the birthplace of all your suppressed human potential. That pure and authentic self is the same ground in all of us… but its the way we grow uniquely from that universal soil that makes us living art.
That is where our power to influence and heal things outside of ourselves exists....IN OUR OWN INTERNAL ARTISTIC MAKEUP. Once we can connect with that we can not only save ourselves from ourselves, but also be of more service to the healing of others. Don’t ever forget your value and your worth and all of the things that make you the unique expression of the universe that you absolutely are. And appreciate those things, because you will never find anyone that can appreciate you as much as you can appreciate yourself (so stop trying, you will only be disappointed).
And don’t ever let anyone or any thing diminish that.
When a person or situation begins to kill your spirit, wither your self-love, break your deep center of strength and cause self doubt… it IS time to let it go and let it find its own way out of the clouds. Let it meet that Utah stranger on its own. He will show up. He always does.
There is, after all, pain in all kinds of growth, and if we forever cradle something it will never learn to walk on its own. It’s potential will never be cultivated and we are, ultimately, keeping it from the hardships that build strength and wisdom.
It is not as easy as this, of course, and I will continue to suffer for the comfort of others, but I can only work to get better at it… and to walk away with less bleeding of my own.
We cannot play the part of the whole.
We can only play our part.
And that is far more humbling and helpful to the world.
