I have a friend who has worked very hard to produce an exquisite cardset, a beautiful piece of work that will open many doors.
To do that, he has paid the price. He has had to forego many alternatives in order to produce what he did.
Now he's wondering if he should go back with his old girlfriend. He wants to, because the relationship was extremely juicy, but he says that to do so in this situation, he would have to give up the possibility of other romantic relationships.
I advised him to do so, to pay the cost. Why? Because that "greater good" in this case is worth paying for by foregoing a series of other alternatives.
What's the saying? "We can do anything we want, but we can't do everything."
At the level where we seem to be making decisions, in order to do anything worthwhile, whether it's a relationship or a vision or a quality of being, we have to be willing to give up numerous other alternatives.
As a simple example, if we're an alcoholic and we want to be an AA member who's living a fruitful life, we have to give up the alternative of alcohol.
This becomes all the more true when we consider a quality of being such as love or compassion.
There was a moment in my life where I made a decision never to say another negative word to someone in my life. It just became clear to me that I didn't want to put any negative energy at all into the universe if I could help it, and that words—I knew this from my own experience—could be deeply wounding.
I never wanted to be harsh with someone again. If I couldn't be kind, I would try to just say nothing. I might not always succeed at it, but that became my intention, my leaning.
In order to do that, I would have to forsake the pleasure of telling people off, of telling them how they should be different—for their own good of course (!)—and of the pleasure of telling people why they were wrong or why what they were doing was unacceptable.
But giving up, or attempting to give up, those alternatives became worthwhile when I considered the larger vision, to become someone who might someday be able to look at the world and truly love it just as it is and just as it shows up everywhere.
It would mean that I would have to look at those people or parts of the world that I formerly found unacceptable and forego the pleasure of condemning them so that I could have the much larger pleasure of loving them just as they are.
If we truly see that it's actually the infinite everywhere, hiding behind every face and every situation and every moment and every feeling, then we become more stable, because we're no longer going through life figuring out what we'll condemn—with the resulting emotions of fear, anger, sadness, etc.
We become willing to let everything be the way it is, which—hmm!—it already is anyway. It becomes like the question Groucho Marx used to ask on his show: "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" It becomes that simple-minded.
I wish I could say that I'm perfect about this in some way, but of course I can't. Like all of us, in the illusion of the "personal decider," I just do the best I can.
So sometimes I'm loving and sometimes not, sometimes I'm perceived that way and sometimes not, but the intention is always there in the background; the leaning is always there.
As far as I can tell, the greatest experience that we humans can have is falling in love. The more we fall in love with it all, the more surrendered, trusting, peaceful—you name it—we become.
Does it matter that our love isn't perfect? Of course not. What matters is the intention, which way we're sailing our boat each day.
Our boat may or may not reach some "destination." But if we're getting up each day and setting our sails towards love and compassion as best we can, in some sense we've already arrived. We're always already here, sweetheart.
—jim sloman 5/1/01
|
