I am compelled to begin this text with the pain of loss, the challenge of embracing impermanence and the invitation to lose everything in order to gain everything – otherwise I would freeze into the rigidity of inauthenticity.
One Sunday morning I was inspired and wrote this retrospective with passion and creativity fueling a stream of words, sentences and metaphors that easily fell into my lap and onto the page. By the end I reviewed the text, and like God in Genesis I saw everything I had made, and behold, it was very good. Then, I clicked the wrong button and all was lost. The precious hours gone, the force of my writing destroyed forever, other demands of the day now beckoning me. I was furious, images of my laptop smashed into a million pieces in a corner of my study racing through my mind. Free-floating anger, then desperate and futile attempts at recreating what was lost, high Adrenaline and Cortisol levels in my blood I am sure, stress, tension, then finally despair, resignation, wanting to give up forever, swearing (screw this!) – until ….. I began to reason as I imagine God would.
OK – it’s all good! A moment of genius (or at least of perceived genius), or a moment of completeness, wholeness, unity. Then the click on a wrong button – geez, maybe the right button! The one that DELETES, that mercilessly kills your ego and reminds you of your attachments; the one that insists on the truth of impermanence – the button of death of past and future in the cemetery of the present moment … the button that ensures your resurrection!
What amazing force in this by-mistake-delete button – it sends me off the deep end like a stampeding buffalo herd falling off a cliff – smashing, destroying, raging, stressing, despairing, giving up and pulverizing into dust. That’s OK, too, God tells me. It is all part of everything God made and what God saw was good. Go for it, rage against destiny and savor your exhaustion. Let me ask you, God tells me, do you really think reality cares? And once you realize that what is is, do really think there is any corner of reality I don’t deeply love, including your little temper tantrums?