No guarantees

“It’s the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee.”
~ Nicholas Sparks

We live in a universe of possibilities with no guarantees. The combined effect of imagination, attitude, behavior, and fate determines what transforms from the possible to the probable, and less often the actual. “Close, but no cigar,” may be your most reasonable expectation in life. You are a player, not a guarantor, within the universe of possibilities; the co-creator of your experiences, without having a say in the final outcomes. That is the house rule, whether you accept it or otherwise.

Moving minds

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
~ Robert Frost

Does life move along, or does your continuous, non-stop decision making process give the appearance of movement and change? Your life may be like a blank canvas of an interminable form, remaining essentially the same from cradle to grave, but animated by a lifetime of choices and irrevocable decisions.

“Mix up a little more shadow color here, then we can put us a little shadow right in there. See how you can move things around? You have unlimited power on this canvas — can literally, literally move mountains”
~ Bob Ross

Some physicists view reality as a hologram of infinite possibilities: Your current experience being the latest possibility that you’ve chosen to manifest within your mental canvas of physical space or imagination. The illusion of movement and change being like a mental video of your chosen experiences, displayed frame by frame, sequentially or otherwise – you being at the controls, doing the cutting, splicing, layering, timing, animating, etc.

Breaking yourself

“I once loved someone so much that I tried to fix them while they were breaking me.”
~ Unknown author

Was this an authentic expression of your love for someone? Or were you trying to fix this someone, to better meet your needs and fill that emptiness inside of you? Maybe you broke yourself by attempting the impossible?

It is not your role or privilege to decide whether someone needs fixing. People choose to be who they are being, despite the self-inflicted pain of deprivation it causes you. It is their choice to be a particular kind of someone – without consideration for your opinion or judgment in the matter – until they choose to be someone else. Authentic love is possible when you accept and embrace someone as they choose to be, not as they could be or should be, according to you.

“I can’t help people by damaging myself. In fact, if it’s beginning to destroy me, I can be confident it’s not helping them.“
~ Hugh Prather

You may be able to help someone make a different choice, to become something or someone else, but only “if” they invite your assistance. Do not break “yourself” by relentlessly pursuing change where change is uninvited and unavailable to you.

Nobody will authentically change to accommodate your neediness to feel more loved. The only real change will be your diminished feelings of self-worth, the humiliating side effect of trying to change what does not want to be changed.

The unknowable reality

“Look at the tree in front of you. Are you actually looking at the tree or is thought looking at it? Hear the crow cawing. Are you listening to it, or are you identifying the sound with the bird? Can you look at somebody without the image that you have about that someone?”
~ J. Krishnamurti

Alan Watts and a subset of other philosophers, such as J. Krishnamurti, traded in the typical workings of the human brain for a reality without thoughts, mental images, symbols, and other brain sponsored filters and coloring. Their core ideal was to not confuse the map with the territory – a common slogan for this movement back in the not so distant past.

Being a Krishnamurti fan back in my college days, I would often sit cross-legged in front of a big old tree, attempting to perceive it without any previous mental or emotional associations with the word “tree” or its image. However, as Krishnamurti would have likely pointed out, my effort to perceive with an empty mind would be filled with expectations – thoughts and images – of what a tree without memories of trees would look and feel like, and so any effort was doomed to failure, and it was. My noble effort was just as ridiculous as trying to hear and know the sound of one hand clapping, another one of those koans or puzzles offered by the thoughtless thinkers of the past – the gifted or practiced ones who “supposedly” achieved empty mindedness.

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Unfinished

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
~ Lao Tzu

Despite the inevitability of change, you pursue the finished in people, places, things, situations, and achievements. However, nothing is ever finished, despite your habit of seeking the finished within the unfinished, your desire to finally ARRIVE and say this is my place, my time, my lover, my body, my property, my talent, my success, my legacy, etc.

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