In this game called Life it doesn't matter where you
start. I myself seem to have started somewhere in the middle. The only
thing that matters is you give away more transformation than you
receive.
Some time around now (it may have been closer to August 1978 but
nonetheless some time around NOW) I began noticing my
entire life is driven by patterned behavior and no-choice responses.
Well, perhaps it's only some or maybe even
most but arguably not all of my life which is
on automatic that way? I certainly hoped it
isn't all of it ...
Yet even then I already suspected whatever aspects of my life which
don't appear to be on automatic are indeed also on automatic. I
just hadn't invested the time to get clear about it yet.
When I saw that, I didn't like what I saw. It's implication is I'm a
machine
and my whole
god-damned
life is totally on automatic - not just some
of it, not most of it, but all of it. For the
next few years I tried pretending I didn't see what I'd seen.
Yet no matter how much pretense, no matter how much avoidance, no
matter how much denial I brought to it, I did see what I'd
seen. The genie's out of the lamp. My life, such as it was up till
then, had ended. Specifically, my entire way of being
alive ie how I regarded what it means to be alive, was
finished. It's a throwaway.
Perhaps it's incorrigible that anything could render me both aghast as
well as profoundly happy at the same time. But that event did. I
celebrated it - privately, quietly, and appropriately. And then,
bearing down through my awareness, quiet as a whisper at first and then
later loud and completely unavoidable, like a meteor from the edge of
deep space racing into and through
Earth's
atmosphere, came the question:
What now? What's next?
I'm excited, touched, moved,
privileged,
altered, and expanded by this open question, by this possibility of
possibility itself. What's an appropriate response to it? I'm still
the same ordinary guy I always was, just an ordinary guy who's taken on
living the challenges of a transformed life, one of which is the
challenge of giving up investment in meaning.
It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a
meaning driven man to be transformed (as Matthew the apostle quotes
Jesus Christ
as saying). The challenge of liquidating all stocks in the meaning
driven life is a requirement for getting through the
eye of the needle.
It doesn't imply, as it's often mistakenly assumed, things don't mean
anything. Rather, it implies I own I'm the author of the meaning I
assign to things.
That leads me to this insight: in the face of realizing my life is a
throwaway, I may as well let it be used by something great.
Who I am
is the possibility of communication, transformation, and freedom. I'm
committed tomy children
and to
being presence
for them. When they turn eighteen, an arbitrary indicator in the
timeline of their lives,
I'll think of something
else to do, I'll relook at what's possible. Until then my life is
given as their father.
As far as sourcing these
Conversations For Transformation
goes, the pen's bonded to my fingers, the brush is tied to my hand.
I'll be doing this until I can't do anything anymore.