Hand made earth toy on hands
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Revelation 22:13
I love beginnings when everything is fresh and clean and new. Like climbing into bed on fresh sheet day.
Ends? Not so good with the ends. Feels like someone is setting my bed on fire, sometimes with me in it.
Takes the safe out of sleeping for a while.
I could begin again forever.
That would be bliss.
Cannot begin without an end. Fuck. Can I at least be the one tossing the match?
There exists a basic Buddhist truth. One that brings comfort to some and terror to others.
Everything is temporary.
I’m on team comfort, in almost all ways.
I exist in two places. Light and dark. Kansas and Oz, I prefer Oz. More magic there.
I am ever changing, like the weather and about as predictable as tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis. Ya, we kinda saw that coming, just not fast enough to actually do anything about it. Sorry about that, so sorry.
If I am to accept my darkness will become light, which it does. I require this to be the truth. Then I must also accept that on occasion, my light goes out. And it does, usually with an earth shattering ka-boom.
Here is the thing. We are no different than flowers or trees. We need all sorts of things to grow. Sunlight, rain, the occasional windstorm to knock lose branches and leaves that no longer serve us and the periodic dormancy that is winter.
There have been times in my life when I thought winter would last forever. I was so buried in the shit I couldn’t see anything much less a way out. By remaining stuck in those moments, I supressed my own growth. “I might die here” is not a good mantra especially when coupled with “and I want to”.
Time moves, life moves, we move. Whether we see it and chose to participate in the movement or not, it’s there. Eventually you will see it. You’re not going to die here if you don’t want to.
“I can’t go on like this”
“That’s what you think”. (Samuel Beckett)
The power contained within those words is almost tsunami-like.
No matter how good or bad a moment is, it’s going to pass, it has to.
You can chose to stay in it, or you can open your eyes and see what is next.
Your movement, your thoughts, your choice.
I now see beauty and the necessity in destruction and reconstruction. Even if something looks familiar, it’s unique to this moment. This moment is new. You can slather the past and fear all over it or you can savour it for what it is. I like my future naked.
Look at it this way. Life is a play. Who in the fuck really wants to watch a play where the scenery never changes and the characters just stand there. Um, no one. Or really, not anyone I want to hang out with, that is not my theater.
Instead we get this…
“wow this feels fucking horrible, this too shall pass and something better will come”
(enter something better stage left)
“wow, this feels amazing, this too shall pass and something else will happen”
(enter the next thing via a bunch of ropes and pulleys from the ceiling)
And so it goes…
I am in a constant state of renewal. Exits and entrances, some grand some subtle but always kind.
Herein lies the twist.
I am holding onto a fear that I am temporary.
If everything is temporary, and I am a part of everything, why does it trouble me to feel this way?
If there is always a beginning and an end, why do I need the end to come from an outside source?
I don’t.
I can decide this.
This feeling, person, place or thing no longer serves me.
I chose to let this pass.
The end.
Sounds simple on paper. But…there is always a fucking but.
I struggle with low self-worth and abandonment issues. I am 10X more likely to hear the negative than the positive, especially when I am dark, then that phenomenon is amplified.
I used to lie. A LOT.
I stopped.
I was lying to keep people, telling them what I thought they wanted to hear. Padding things I had done to make them look softer.
I got called out on it by someone who basically knew the entire time and loved me anyways.
I realized if I had to lie to keep people, then they weren’t worth keeping and I was not worth being around.
Nothing was real.
Lying is like fucking work and leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Also, people shouldn’t be kept, with lies or without.
It was a process to quit. I had to admit any lie I told within 24 hours and accept the consequences.
It worked. And it is so much better here.
I need to face my fear of temporary and doling out my own ends the same way.
I need to remember in every moment the companion truth to everything being temporary.
“Everything is as it should be”. (The Dalai Lama)
Nothing is the end of the world, except the end of the world. At that point, not all of the fucks in the world will make a damn bit of difference.
