It has been hard to come back.
Even though one of my friends teased me today that I was just suffering the post-wedding let-down of "not getting to be a princess anymore", I would say that's only part of it. And for the record, I wasn't really so much a princess as I was, an...I don't know...an 1800's-era sepia-toned photograph? Of a cowgirl. Getting married. To a prince.
Heh heh.
So, maybe it's a little bit that.
I will save you the gory details of all this and just say, when one (me), does something momentous in one's life (maaaaaaarried), it tends to get the ol' wheels a spinning regarding what one's purpose is and how far down the path to exceptional-ness one is.
And there, of course, lies the rub.
Because that pesky search for the exceptional is, for this writer, just a one-way ticket to despair. And I can not believe that I'm alone in this. Aren't we all suffering just a little bit from the sting of constant failure in the face of one-million-and-one messages of, "you are special and can have whatever you want" that are being beamed at us on a daily basis, not just in our various careers and endeavors, but also in our advertising, in the anxiety-death-trap of Facebook and even in (gulp) our yoga practices? Am I the only one who feels that having to acknowledge, over and over again, that I am neither Oprah nor Angelina Jolie nor Eckhart Tolle, is downright galling, and proof-positive of my having failed in the world at large?
Anyone?
I was listening to an interview with Carolyn Myss the other day (who I find completely terrifying and mesmerizing...terrifying because she gets so yell-y about lazy spiritualism, and mesmerizing because she's the angriest mystic I've ever encountered, and that's just hard not to love), and she was talking about how so many (lazy!) people are running around feeling terrified of being ordinary, and because of that, are just filling their lives with distraction. Anything they can use to prove to themselves, and everyone else, that they are not (god forbid)...one of the normals.
(quick tangent: one day, when Paul and I were looking for wedding venues, we got a tour of this resort place in Big Bear, and the woman taking us on the tour kept talking about how celebrities come and stay there sometimes and how you'd never know they were celebrities, "because they look just like normals". As if these were the only two categories of human: Celebrities...and Normals.)
And this, Shanti-towners, this quest to not be one of the Normals...is a totally destructive one. And I know, because I am very, very, very familiar with it. Very. Veeeeeeeeeeery.
The desire to be exceptional driven by the fear of ordinary-ness, is not just really, really painful, it is also totally and completely unproductive.
Because, in order to measure one's life against the ordinary/exceptional-o-meter, one has to step out of one's life. You can't measure that which you're, you know, actively participating in. So, everything has to come to a halt while you jump OUT of your life, drag out your various methods of calculation and evaluation, and then, once you've proven (once again) that you are NOT in fact a gorgeous genius in the way you thought you were/were told you should be/promised you would be, then you have to spend some time...weeping. Or breaking things. (Whichever way you're wired). And then?
Well then you need to make a PLAN.
You need to make the Big Plan to Once and For All Change Things For The Better. But, oh! Shoot! Before you even MAKE the Big Plan to Once and For All Change Things For The Better, you have to make sure that you've sussed out all the possible options of arenas in which this plan will take place. This is going to take some real serious fantasizing and pointless internet-searching. After all, you don't want to commit to the Big Plan to Once and For All Change Things For The Better and have it be the wrong plan now, do you? That would be really bad. That would mean that you might never actually be exceptional. No, no, you have to paste together all the appropriate clues and signs and hunches into exactly the right formula or else, who knows, you might not end up taking the right exit. And then your exceptionalness will just be waiting there for you, stranded...and she's a fickle one, that exceptional-ity, and she might just take off with someone else. Some hapless traveler who took YOUR goddamn exit.
No, you must think carefully. Best not act too quickly.
And so there you sit, wondering if it's this path or this one or that one, and how it might look, and how great it's going to be, and how all the struggles of your life have probably just led you here, how this moment, picking your toes on your couch is probably your watershed moment, and when they make the biopic about your life, this is going to be the surprising turn-around moment, the one where all your family and friends are like, "we always knew she'd do something big, and finally she did".... But you wonder why, then, you feel so stuck. And you wonder why everyone else seems to be...getting things done.
But then you make yourself feel better, because you realize that those poor sods, those folks out there in the world actually making movies and writing books and designing footwear...those folks probably haven't done this important work you're doing. Those folks probably aren't destined for greatness, so it's much easier for them, to waste their time...accomplishing things. Let them have their toys of productivity! Let them be engaged in the day to day process of living! Fodder for the Normals! You are better than that. You are heading towards greatness!
How do you knooooooow? Well, you're...
thinking about it...
a lot, and um...
it's really a high priority...
eventually, so...
uh.
(Am I making my point?)
What I come back to, again and again, in my own uncomfortable quest for...something. For purpose, I guess. For engagement. Is that the art of living requires a kind of real surrender. Not surrender to some greater "god" force (though that's part of it), but surrender just to the daily back-and-forth act of living. Surrendering to your actual life. The surrendering up of the part of you that wants to evaluate and control. Surrendering so that what is in front of you, is enough. Surrendering so that you can DO things without constantly evaluating the worth of those things based on what they might GET you.
So, maybe all of that energy, all of that time we're taking to figure out how we can and what we need to do in order to make our lives BETTER. Finally fixed. Finally perfect. Maybe we should instead be using all of that energy to live the life we currently have. Imagine what we could do. Imagine the kind of awesome shit you could do, if you weren't trying to change anything...if you were just trying to glorify what currently IS?
Because THAT, I'm coming to believe, that day-to-day communion with our own lives, no matter what they look like...that is just about as exceptional as we can get.
