Seeing through the fog
“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?” ― Dogen
It doesn’t get any easier: trying to understand what’s really in play.
…a moving, shifting, universal flow of energy.
Possibly or more than likely but we’ve still to make sense of our earth-bound, angst-ridden days, haven’t we?
I’d be the first to accept that if you’re not careful you can succumb to being an endless seeker. If not of the metaphysical kind at least one where you don’t (daily) feel torn apart by the vicissitudes of life.
Been there.
It’s a wonder sometimes how we carry on. (Perhaps we’ve no choice.)
At some stage though, not for everyone, something happens — often not of our making — where you see life for what it truly is. Or at least that’s my experience. In that moment of clarity or deep self-recollection you don’t so much as answer the interminable question, “Who am I?”, but you realise that there’s a wide open, mysterious space of ‘not knowing’ and it’s okay to inhabit that in a peaceful, contemplative way.
Then again, you might go through life with no sense of anything more than what’s right in front of you. And too often if something’s not happening, or something that appears unexciting, we create something just to feel alive. A new business, a new relationship, a new opportunity, a new regime, a new habbit — you get the drill. I don’t know why we’re inclined this way. Perhaps it’s because, absent a bit of chaos, we’re not able to make sense of the quietude or solemn grace that comes with getting old.
In the end, none of this really matters. If we see out our lives obsessed with holding on to the past and trying to make the best use of our give a shit or we fully let go and accept whatever is arising — the good, bad and meh — then no one, or at least not in my experience, is going to judge you. But it does seem, from my limited experience, that at least once in a while, it’s advisable to ask yourself (as an example only) a slightly more insightful question, namely:
absent my thinking, what is there?
Blessings.
— Julian
