Impermanence Is Following Me Around
This past week was kind of the culmination of a theme that has been showing up in my life a lot this past year. Last year I got a new car and promptly backed it into a delivery truck in the grocery store parking lot. No sooner did I get it home than I closed the garage door on it. Not too long after that I left the gate open and the goats ate one of Loren’s prized apricot trees. Later, I put the goats on a leash too close to a grape vine that Loren had been working so hard on and they ate it. Recently we bought a used pop-up camper from a neighbor. It seemed in perfect shape but shortly after we got it one of the outside walls started falling off. I was closing up the camper to take it to the repair man and I forgot to undo something that broke when I closed it up. Add that to the list. On the way to the repair place I left the crank handle that is used to crank up the camper in the crank mechanism (you’re supposed to remove it). It fell out onto the road somewhere along the way. When I got home Loren told me that the repair guy had tried to crank it up to work on it but couldn’t because the crank handle was missing. Doh! We managed to get everything fixed and took it out on our first camping trip of the summer. Everything was supposed to be working in it—and it did for the first hour or so. But then something shorted and the lights and the heater went out. Then I tried to put up the awning and found that there were parts missing. I jerry-rigged it, got it to work for a bit, but when we weren’t looking the wind blew it over and drove one of the sharp aluminum edges through the screen window, tearing it. Doh!
There's a thing that Buddhists call "impermanence." It's a concept that refers to the ever-changing nature of life. Impermanence is present in everything as nothing stays the same for long. It can be a fact of life that causes us suffering, especially if we're resisting it. As I was sitting in front of the river after having put the pop-up camper awning away and trying not to be too hard on myself, I commented to my wife about how I’ve been experiencing, what a teacher of mine calls, the massage of impermanence, a lot lately. Still a little miffed that I had let the goats eat her plants and had broken our new camper, she said, “Yes, impermanence seems to be following you around lately."-- a really nice way to point out that I've been leaving a trail of destruction in my wake lately. It's true. Impermanence had been following me around for about a year. Life has been trying to make a point and I'm just now getting it. I think It's telling me something important about my relationship to abundance: I may say that I want all the abundance that is available to me but deep down inside somewhere there's a conflict. I say I want joy and love unparalleled but there's a part of me that's afraid to get it because it might go away. Part of me wants more money but part of me doesn't want the responsibility. Part of me wants more nice things but it hurts when those nice things get tarnished, which they will. If I want the abundance I have to accept the impermanence, too. If I just want abundance but not impermanence it messes with the flow of life and abundance won't happen in the first place. The river comes AND goes and playing in the river isn't fun for long if you can't let it do both.
This is just one example of an unconscious and deeply held belief and how it can befuddle our living the lives we know we can live. You can see how this could be applied to any number of situations in life: the desire for more money, the desire for a relationship, the desire for a certain job, etc... The work I'm doing at the Network Life Center is designed to bring that unconscious stuff to the surface so we can see it. If we can see, then we can make a choice.
If there's anyone you know who's interested in maximizing their growth and evolution as a human being and feeling a lot better in their body along the way, please pass this post and this offer along to them.
Yours In Healing,
Jay
