Friday, February 19, 2021

THEY KEEP COMING...

 ... the lessons, that is. They keep coming...

I woke this morning early with a feeling of release. I thought to have finished the book I have been working on with a completed second draft, and had decided to put aside at least for a few days the work on taxes that will need to be done soon. From that perspective, early on, waking up in bed, the day promised to be one in which I could enjoy doing absolutely nothing except those things I felt like doing. It was a good feeling. 

Then...

In my morning sit, I had a sudden insight about the book. I have suspected at some restless place in the back of my mind that there remains a basic, unaddressed problem that could be boiled down to one simple, rather devastating question: what's the point? And the answer popped up unexpectedly, annoyingly, provocatively this morning, as I sat in meditation. It's a good answer, but it means a lot more work. It means going back to the beginning again and making changes throughout. It might mean a radical change at the end. I don't know yet. But I do know that this new idea would improve the book immensely--and that it will take a whole lot more time.

Damn!

Worse. I checked my email, as I usually do first thing (by this time there may be fifty, sixty, seventy new arrivals, most of them of no earthly interest), and found a blizzard of alerts from the site I use to stand guard over my passwords, all notifying me of a possibly serious compromise to my dozens of password-protected accounts. Which means--unless I find some other way to deal with this--revisiting all those websites to make changes to my profile and security, at the cost of a huge amount of time and aggravation.

Damn again!

This one is a lesson I've had to relearn too many times already. Nothing is stable, fixed, immutable. There is absolutely nothing that can be absolutely counted on. Everything is subject to the whims of change. The only constant is inconstancy. And the only reasonable strategy is to flow with the change with as much equanimity as I can muster. I fall back on more than 20 years of practice--only to find that the supposed wisdom gleaned from its undoubted benefits can suddenly and ignominiously be snatched away. And I'm back, as they annoyingly say, to square one: beginner's mind.


2 comments:

Marie Smith said...

Amazing how the mind works on something unconsciously and the a-ha moment results. Better now than later. Good luck with it.

Anonymous said...

That's the way it's supposed to work... the price of consciousness I would guess. Ron