WAITING

I'm compulsively on time. In fact, if I'm not ten minutes early, I feel that I'm late. Time is my tyrant with all the earmarks of compulsion - the sense of something driving me, an anxious motor, its low vibrations quickening my pulse rate. I don't know why I'm like this but I can say, given all the time I spend waiting for other people, if I have to have a compulsion about time I'd much rather it was for being late. The idea of other people waiting for me is an unexpectedly pleasant possibility.
     Actually, there's another kind of waiting I think about more. It's the waiting that comes out of magical thinking. Something will happen and I'll be changed - I'll put out a piece of work and its reception will change my life. I'll get this or that or meet someone. and everything will be different. I may as well say I'll win the lottery.
     It's the kind of waiting that flies under my radar, so much a part of me I don't even notice it. I don't notice what it tells me: it's all right to be passive, I don't have to push past my resistance to discipline, I don't have to get up and do anything at all. Waiting's voice isn't as loud as it used to be - I've pushed past many of the things that blocked me - but on days when I don't feel like doing anything, and then don't, those days when I let things slide, I know the voice hasn't died away. I'm sure it will follow me into my grave. 
     It isn't easy noticing core issues, the ones that travel through as silently and invisibly as the blood travelling through my veins. But sometimes, I take a step back, not planning it, and I have a moment of clarity. I see what has been circulating inside;it comes up to consciousness and I can put it into words. That's the beginning of all great change, bringing into consciousness just what has been holding me back. Once I see it, I can move it around, look at it from different angles, and make out its anatomy. I can study how it works in me. I can shake hands with it, no longer in denial, or fear of what will arise, or the obliviousness that comes so easily. And I can surrender to time, acknowledge there are certain issues I will deal with again and again. But I know I will make progress and that's what matters - the sense that I'm heading in the right direction. A momentum starts to build, an appetite for working at change. There is so much hope in that energy, and it's hope that leads me on.
     

RECONCILIATION, AGAIN

I keep coming back to how resonant the concept of "reconciliation" is for me. Bringing the many aspects of my being into balance. Understanding the past and bringing it into the present. Making the way I was and the way I am now harmonious, unified. When I think about how much has changed in me, what I used to be like, I don't think I've shed or left anything behind. My voyage hasn't been about dropping things by the wayside. It been about embracing all that used to be, and in that embrace making the past, all of it, an organic part of the present.  There's no disjunction. My old ideas, the ones that caused me suffering and gave rise to fear - their remnants are at the heart of who I am now. 
     Evolution is the model, an imperceptible transformation in which I can't point to a clear line between the many steps of change. I can see a moment when things are different but I can't say precisely when that difference occurred, like inhaling and exhaling and not being able to isolate the moment when one turns into the other.
    There have been many times in the past when insight has given me a new view of my past. Often, I felt ashamed of all I hadn't known, how wrong I had been about myself, embarrassed by things I said and did. Instinctively, I wanted to run from that vision of the past. But somehow I learned that the desire to run would only continue the cycle of denial and self-loating. Freedom would only come when I looked clearly with my new vision and completely embraced who I had been. Compassion was the bridge between the old and the new. Compassion was the way to reconciliation. 
     I can try to explain what I mean but words don't really get at the power "reconciliation" has for me. It sets off many images, the kind we all have, so deep and pervasive we hardly know how to describe them. Mine are grounded in time measured in slow transformations - the viscous liquid in a lava lamp moving in slow suspension, the subtle shifts of light on the color spectrum, the unfolding of a seedling in stop motion. And there's also the image of putting my arms around my younger self, taking her into me and in that taking feel myself expand. 
     Slow time. Continuous time. A more harmonious self, a wiser self, struggling to be born.