Life always has a way of showing you different paths, paths to nurture your soul or your vices, paths that open your being to a more flexible or more rigid life. Paths that help you to define who you are. In the last few days, the wind has been beautifully strong. I call it beautiful because I really appreciate the power of nature, a power normally taken for granted until it literally hits you. I was meditating this morning and trees and bushes danced savagely in front of me, one of those plants usually lives indoors, but I forgot to take it in, thus a few leaves and branches could not handle the wind’s strength. But what I found the most fascinating, while I was seated in that meditation cushion in my courtyard, were all the bushes and small trees that could sway nonstop. These little plants grew with resilience, survived the winter and they were thriving in this weather. I could not stop thinking that I wanted to write about them later today. I could not stop thinking how important it is to simply dance with the circumstances, how if your roots are strong nothing will bother you, that our environment can make us stronger or weaker and that we are the gardener of this amazing botanical experience called life. Today I wish I was a bit more plant savvy, like my friend Julie, who seems to understand plants in ways that I can probably understand some Salsa Movements. Nonetheless, I still find the green amusing.
This week I was learning about how sometimes we make ourselves very rigid, by expecting the world to be the way we want it to be, nothing further from reality. We all have that friend who loses it for the most insignificant reasons, and you might believe that I am not that type of guy, but in many ways I am. I used to hate and still struggle when I am not capable of reacting accordingly to life’s simple distractions. By accordingly I mean, creating simple boundaries that I can respect and communicate to others, or to respond to distractions in the best way possible. I like to believe though that I am learning and adjusting and I think everything starts with the definition, like this person who blows up for “insignificant” reasons. I am someone who likes to work through my tasks with some kind of flow and productivity, but these tasks are not always clear and the interruptions are not always bad. Yet, insignificant is my meaning for this person’s reasons. However, clearly, they are not insignificant and he or she might find them very disrespectful. These definitions can make us react to these situations, the key word here, react, because reactions of this kind can leave us with a sense of regret or sorry that’s coming our way. I wish my roots were so strong and my stems so flexible that I could go back to my connection with what really matters to me at any given moment.
In part, I need to lose a little bit of this sense of perfection and yes this might feel like we are losing a couple of leaves, which is just a way to adjust. But as humans, one way I found to make these changes possible is through awareness. Meditation helps me to realise how my world and the tight definitions in my head are constructions, some from the way I was raised and some that I still create everyday. Undoubtedly I still need to create spaces to analyse this definition by talking to a friend or journaling, “An unexamined life is not worth living”. Well, that is Socrates’ opinion, not everyone has the time, the knowledge or the interest to examine their life. Yet, when we don’t think about our own life, we just jump into the train of living what we are living when a lot that happens around us seems to be uncontrollable or foreign, falling often from just doing what everyone else wants from us. Yet our lives and experiences are being unstoppably created by our own perception. So I like to be one of those who sits down and analyses how I can do something better, how I can improve my life and the lives of those around me. In that way, I could find what fertiliser suits me better.
The times when things really bother me are times when I am either tired, hungry or have no idea what I am really doing. So when an interruption happens, I can not cope and a feeling of disrespect takes over me, and a loud cry of I don’t know leave me alone. Sometimes this happens because I did not communicate my intentions in the best way or I did not know what I was doing. Yes it is good to be flexible to the world and understand that we do not know it all and that we can create better ways to explain to ourselves or to others what we are thinking.
Life is beautiful and it won’t wait for you to reflect about it. This beautiful reality encourages me to learn, to research inward and outward. Education can always bring better points of view that allow all to improve in the direction that we want to go. It is vital to understand our limitations. To rest and feed our body accordingly are some of the most important roots in our lives. Very often we ignore these basic realities because they are so mundane that we miss their importance in our life.
Education and a place to clarify your ideas and knowledge. Some experimenting and some time are vital. Please just give your soul the amount of water and sunlight it needs, expose it to the things you would like to be part of your life and please… dance with the wind.
Gracias for reading,
Pedro