Empty, Dumb and Free at Last!

62012

Empty, Dumb and Free at Last!

i used to think there was a “right answer”. I was trained to think that. When I got the right answer-said or did-the right thing at home, i got approval and acceptance. When I got the answer right, especially when I got it right quickly, I got praise and high grades. When i grew older and  left home and finished schooling I began working in the so-called, adult world. 

I rebelled against the world I had been raised to fit into and chose to live on the edges complaining about the injustices of the world, the horrors humans perpetrated upon one another and to assuage my suffering, did a lot of drugs and lost myself in brief pleasures. All the while I was keeping one eye on the lookout for “the right” answer for myself. I was on a laudable suffering journey looking for the meaning, the purpose of life. I became a very depressed existentialist.

Many years and people and jobs and marriages and children went by. Many workshops and seminars and recovery rooms and rituals and personal growth and enlightenment books went by. Many many years...

Finally I gave up or more accurately began the process of giving up everything I knew, my beliefs, my judgments, my rightness and my wrongness, my ideas of good and bad. From this empty and dumb place I finally became a student; one without the learning disability of arrogance or despair. Now that the student has appeared, the teachers are everywhere!

They were there all along but in my compulsion to find my perfect  “guru” I was habitually looking for my answers “out there”. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Now that I can see, the answer (as per usual) seems so simple and clear. 

The purpose of my life is to create a purpose for my life. I decide the meaning; what is important and what is not. And...I knew who I was and what I was about until the colossal self doubt that I developed from working so hard to be what I was not, to fit into a deranged world founded on fear, a belief in scarcity and bereft of any support to fuel a genuine spiritual (not religious)  connection, separated me from the truth of myself all these many years.  The powerful need to belong and be acceptance from the herd over rode my authenticity and my relationship with my real self. 

For some and at different times in ones life, the meaning and purpose of life changes. Perhaps scaling a mountain is your calling, at least until your knees go bad like most knees eventually do. Or singing or teaching, or traveling and writing; it really doesn’t matter. For me, as long as I source whatever it is I’m doing from kindness and appreciation for the world and everything and everyone in it-including myself-then the endless seeking journey ends and life becomes ongoing moments of arrival after arrival to this very moment here and now.