Dancing Geek

Is that true?
Well, no.  I’d like there to be a meaning to life, but there doesn’t have to be one, and I certainly couldn’t tell you what it is.
Aside: Who is it that wants there to be a meaning to life?  My egoic self, it wants to have purpose and meaning, to justify it’s existence and feel special.  I can get a small sense of deeper peace within me that doesn’t require there to be any meaning, that just is.

How do you react when you believe that it is true?
I despair.  I get depressed that I cannot find this meaning and purpose within my own life.  I feel dread, and this lump of solid, black, toxic goop settle in my chest.

Who would you be without the belief that there should be a meaning to life?
If I didn’t believe there should be a meaning to life then I would be more peaceful.  I would be open to life showing me great joy and purpose, but also to never experiencing that.  I would be able to accept those times where I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing.  I wouldn’t worry about making sure I was on the right path.  I wouldn’t worry about wasting my life.  I would be more able to just enjoy what is.

How can you turn it around?  And give 3 ways that it’s true for you for each one.

There shouldn’t be a meaning to life.
Without a set sense of purpose I am free to follow whatever paths show up in life.  A sense of meaning is a way to feed the egoic mind, the little self, and keeps me focussed in the future on some end result rather than in the now.  Searching for meaning is a way to keep the searching mind in charge, rather than accepting what is.

My ego is fighting back

I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking over the summer.  It’s led to me digging even deeper still in what started years ago now as a quest to find my perfect job.  Having got to a stage where I’ve shed a lot of unnecessary gunk in my head it seems that my ego (aka little self, egoic mind, sense of separateness, false identity) is fighting back against it’s ultimate demise.  I got all caught up this evening around having no sense of purpose to life and how depressing that was.  It’s fair to say that I haven’t shifted entirely into embracing the possibility of there being no purpose or overarching meaning to my life (by which I mean my external life, rather than my internal or ‘spiritual’ life), but at least I’ve cracked the vice-like grip it had earlier on this evening.

It turns out that planning where our dance group is going, and what we want to be doing, will trigger the same thoughts about me.  I’ve still yet to fully incorporate the realisation that planning is only useful for the bare minimum of getting things done, and is not useful (indeed is counter-productive) when applied to life in general.  This could make it difficult for me to get anything done without freaking out, unless I can keep reminding myself that I don’t need to plan my entire life.

Joely wrote a post about there being no “there” to go to and it got me thinking about where I was going on this (for lack of a better word) journey I’m currently on, that was originally started by a sense that I was in the wrong place.

There is no “there” to get to

The post mentioned (to paraphrase) the idea that being “nearly there” in terms of personal development is an ongoing situation.  That you don’t really ever get “there” because “there” is the make-believe utopian state of perfection that no person will ever reach.

This makes a lot of sense, but only I think after getting to the point where mindfulness has become a habit, at least for me.  I have gone through a series of steps that means I can, with hindsight, see how this has been true for me.  So far it’s been like this:

• At first there is the learnt numbness (for many different reasons; so many of us do learn it however)
• Then there is the dissatisfaction
• Then the decision to find another way (such a big deal at that time – and it is something to celebrate for each person)
• Then the drive to find some big white light
• And then the gradual realisation that it was something very small all along that needed to change

It’s the last part that I think is the realisation that there is no “there” to get to, that we aren’t broken, that we don’t need fixing, that we can accept ourselves as we are now, that we’ll never be finished and have no issues to work on.

This last step is accepting that we simply need to bring mindfulness into everything we do.

It’s almost disappointing

It’s such a small thing and yet it’s affect is so very profound.  Only when you’ve had time to see the massive impact that it’s had, to not just learn that mindfulness will do this and intellectually understand the principle, but to have actually experienced the massive changes that come about from being mindful, only then does it not seem like the tiniest thing.

So to get to that last step we* have to build up the change into something massive in our heads.  We have to feel that there’s something massively wrong with the way we are at first, we have to break through the inertia of living unaware, and it’s so hard to take that first step that we need an image of some amazing revelation, some bright white light, to get us going and keep us going through the difficulty that follows.

Unless we almost trick ourselves into trying out mindfulness in various different forms (possibly along with lots of other gimmicks) we can get stuck searching and researching for the grand unified theory of life without actually making the final realisation.

*We = people like me, not everyone

It’s rocking my world

For me, right now, this realisation is thoroughly profound.  I’m starting to see how chas can write that we should “revel in it“, it being the fact that we make up life as we go along, make mistakes and keep going anyway.

In fact, I was drafting a comment to respond and started writing things like “I’m not quite there, I don’t think” and “I’m still just not quite there yet.  Even if there’s no there to get to!”  Writing this post however has given me the perspective to see that I am there!  That this was just my “Tell myself I’m not ready so I don’t have to do the big scary thing of being out there in the world” pattern showing up again.

A perfect quote

I’m not a big fan of the ‘stick a quote under a title to make it look fancy’ way of writing, but for me, sometimes, a good quote is able to represent the meaning of a big jumble of thoughts.  It’s not really even a quote since I’m not sure if Byron Katie actually said these words, but it’s something I’ve written down, inspired by her work, and it sums up all of this for me quite nicely.

I’m doing the right thing, I just need to be thinking something different.

watching d sunset by Gagan Gupta

Tribes eBook

Along with the Tribes book by Seth Godin, there’s a new free eBook going around, written by those who got in early enough to join the triiibes.com website (what is with that – there’s more than one I in tribe, perhaps?)

Anyway, I opened it, I read the first one and had another BAM! moment. BAM! moments are excellent because they help you realise something that you were ignoring before. BAM! moments suck because they bring up all the hurt, fear & shame that where the reason you were ignoring the something in the first place.

BAM! moments are worth writing about…

Worth reading

The first story/post/section in the eBook is called “Tribes You Don’t Want to Belong to” (not to go offtrack, but why the mixed capitalisation? I always find that annoying). It’s written by Jon Morrow and it’s about being disabled. Go read it.

Worth paraphrasing

I’ve picked out the parts that say what I need to say, added or changed parts that I need and removed bits that don’t apply. They ask you not to change it, but I’m not changing the eBook, I’m just writing my own version of one of the stories. I hope that’s ok by the Triiibe.

Tribes You Don’t Want To Belong To

“Sometimes, you don’t get to choose the tribes that you belong to. They choose you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I’m a member of one of those tribes.”

“But regardless of how we arrived, no one wants to be a member.”

“Some people take it hard. They feel like they’ve been kidnapped from another tribe, the Tribe of Normal People. They feel like everything they were and everything they knew was taken away.

Eventually though, most of us realize that the Tribe of Normal People doesn’t actually exist.”

“It’s strange, but we also tend to stay away from each other, as if being around one another could remind us that we are a member of the tribe. We prefer to forget.

Still, we have common leaders, people that inspire us.”

“For the longest time, I didn’t want to be a part of it.”

“It takes courage to look at yourself and accept your [differences]. It takes courage to love yourself anyway. It takes courage to go beyond merely trying to survive your life and start trying to actually enjoy it.

How could you complain about being in a tribe like that? It’s wonderful.”

“Would I still like to be cured of my [difference]?”

“When you learn to accept yourself, you also learn to accept the tribes you belong to. They don’t have to be rich or clever or even desirable. The fact is, it’s your tribe.

And sometimes, that’s all that matters.”

So what was my point?

Since I’m comparing myself to a disabled person, I want to clarify a couple of things.

My difference isn’t obvious. I can hide my difference if I want to. Some disabled people can too, but not all. I have a choice about letting others who meet me know, but at some point it becomes a choice of lying or being yourself and that isn’t a choice at all.

It affects me everytime I interact with someone. It’s there changing the way I behave, how I connect with people, how I feel. Until I learn completely to not let it define me I will still give it some power over me. In that way I feel it is the same.

I want to know more people in my tribe, but I’m scared by it too.

For both our tribes (Jon’s and mine) I know that there are people who are proud of being a member (heck, I have my moments), and therefore might take offense at the phrase “no one wants to be a member”. The point is that these tribes change the way you view the world – you can’t be in or out of these tribes without changing who you are and how you think. Being in these tribes brings lessons that others don’t always learn, and that’s a bonus, but you can learn these lessons another way, and I therefore think that people (if it were possible to have the choice) would choose the other way. That’s what that phrase means to me. You don’t choose to be a member of the tribe. You find yourself in it and you deal.

I don’t want to offend anyone with this. But I needed to say something.