Have you ever found yourself stuck between a choice you felt compelled to make? Do I go this way or that? It is a temptation to solve the future through the mind and it is generally unsuccessful. Why can’t we solve things in this way? The problem is that considering the choice takes us out of direct experience and into our mind. While this is useful for resolving simple tasks it is not effective with the big picture.
So what are we to do? Be with it. What an annoying statement. This is not a satisfactory answer for the ego. It wants us to solve or at least avoid. Why? So we can beat ourselves up for failing and make a new deal with a great amount of added pressure to make up for yet another failure. It is all a game meant to keep the ego employed. Why not let go? There are many mechanisms in play to assure that we don’t. Beyond redemption there is time. If I don’t hurry up with this, something bad will happen. I am on the clock and must perform. Others may include letting people down, running out of money and so on.
So, letting go. It may feel a bit like meditating. When a thought comes in, we notice it, and then release. In meditation we only need to put up with this for around 20 minutes. Letting go, in the way I refer too, is for life. We imagine that we must use a great deal of brain power to solve these conflicts when, in reality, it requires very little. We make the mistake of equating stress with complexity. Just because we feel overwhelmed by an issue and stuck does not mean the solution itself is difficult. What is difficult is our fear of the outcome.
How many times in our life have we said to ourselves, “I am so fucked!” Has that ever been true? Have we not been able to recover from even the most disastrous of situations? We have. In fact, most of the time, there really isn’t even a loss. When there is, it often ends up being a lesson worth the pain. So letting go means putting away the pocket calculator in favor of the super computer. Why haven’t we already done this? Because pushing the buttons and watching the progress is reassuring. Almost like, if we let go of watching ourselves and allow the answer to be discovered, something bad will happen.
I remember, back in school, I had just purchased my first computer. Before this, the typewriter was the high tech. With my computer I had to insert a floppy disk to copy the paper I was writing. I was so afraid of losing my work to the unseen that I printed my whole document, just in case.
If we pay attention to what we are feeling, we are already computing a solution. This computation works much better when we don’t over focus on the equation. Noticing that we have an issue that bothers us is the first step. Most of us are adept at this. The second is to allow our direct experience in the moment to sort it out for us. We will never know exactly how the work is going or even when it will be finished, but we will find a far greater level of joy in our lives as we pay attention to the magnificent panorama of the moment we are engaged in.
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