I was perplexed as I looked down the street from us and noticed one of our neighbors mow his lawn. We had just emerged from our boarded houses. Days before we were worried South Florida was going to disappear into the arms of a Hurricane Irma. He carefully mowed his lawn leaving perfectly parallel lines as he went back and forth. How strange I thought to myself.
The water was 62 degrees in Deep Creek. We dipped our toes and the chill cast out all of the sleepiness of a lazy summer afternoon in the Great Smokey Mountains. We put out our inner tubes into the creek and approached the first drop. We knew what was coming. Everyone had her strategy. Most maneuvered their tubes so that their feet would go first. Others could not deal with the current and spun without much control as they approached. I worked hard to be in the optimal position not to flip over. I flipped.
Last year Maribel and I began a comprehensive review of our retirement plan. We sat with our trusted financial adviser. We moved money from one account to another. We set up long term health policies. We took out as much financial risk as we could from our future. We don’t really know how it will turn out.
These seemingly random stories have one thing in common. They each point to a very natural impulse to establish order out of a chaotic and potentially dangerous situation. We have a built in mechanism to reestablish familiarity when there’s been trauma and a deep desire to avoid chaos when we see the potential for it down the line.
This impulse to mow, paddle, and save are useful, but it often short-circuits the opportunity for new patterns to emerge that might loosen our attachments to our belief in our own perception. What we often fail to realize that what we perceive is always an interpretation of what is real.
In fact, everything that we think is experience is memory, a story we tell ourselves. There is no language for the moment. To live out of our established perception and not to realize that we are doing so is to miss out on the possibility of waking up. What would happen if we would wake up from our fear?
Notice today how much tidying up you are doing, how much planning, and how much effort goes toward preventing going over the dip. As you do, invoke some loving-kindness for yourself and for all of us who are caught in attempting that perfectly mowed yard, mere hours after a potentially life ending disaster.
We offer ourselves loving-kindness and all others because we know that at some point, everything we hold dear, everything we see, feel, touch, and hear will go out with our last breath. The good news is that we don’t have to wait for that dip to practice noticing and celebrating the possibility that this whole thing we call our life, as good or painful as it is, has been one big amazing ride toward the open arms of love. We practice for this very reason.