I write these blogs not just because I’m an educator, but because I also need to remind myself what I already know.
We don’t live in a world that cultivates awareness, mindfulness, gratitude and a whole host of other qualities that remind us that we are whole human beings with loving hearts and growing spirits. We live in a world that cultivates consumerism, hyper-individualism that leads to isolation, the sacrificing of ethics to what is legal, and fear. So the knowing does not hold on its own. Left alone in that soil, it thins.
I’ve been thinking about the last blog I posted, in which I talked about how the reason we often don’t accomplish our goals is that we haven’t actually decided to do so. We wish, hope, dream, intend, but none of those are equivalent to deciding. When you decide to do something, the doing of it naturally follows.
Look at your own list. You are moving on most of it, and then there are the one or two that have not budged in years. Not because they are harder than the rest.
Last time I wrote about the part that holds a veto: the one that looked at the road you chose, saw a cost you had not counted, and never got asked. Here is what I left out. Sitting down with your own parts is not a thing you do once and then own. It is one more thing you learn, and forget, and have to learn again. You ask who in you is against this. You listen. You get moving, and it works. Then eight months later there is a new decision and you make it the same old way, alone, in your head, on a Tuesday afternoon, and you are surprised when nothing moves.
That forgetting is not stupidity. It is what happens to any practice that stops being practiced.
None of this is new to me. I’d forgotten it a bit somewhere along the way.
Learning is often like that. We learn something. We incorporate it, then it softens over time. We then have to relearn it again, and again, on a deeper level each time around.
Our relationship to ourselves and our relationship to our spouses and partners are really similar. In the first stage of marriage, love is more emotional in nature. Then we go through a rough patch, come out on the other side, and the love we feel is deeper and more based in reality than our fantasy of who we believed our partner to be. Every year we have ups and downs that deepen the way we love our partners, so that at year ten our love is more deeply grounded. While there is still emotion, it is rooted more in a life built together, deeper understanding, and greater knowingness.
Plenty of us never get to year ten. Marriages end at year four, at year nine, at year twenty-six, and some of them end because the rough patch was the truth and not a patch at all. The deepening is not issued with the calendar. It is what becomes available when both people keep choosing it, and both of them have to.
So it is with our own relationship with ourselves. Self-awareness and self-growth are not linear paths. We never fully arrive at perfection; we are an ever evolving species. Self-growth has been compared to an onion. We learn, we grow, we think we’re done with the lesson, but a year or two or ten later, we seem to be working on the same issue we thought we were complete with. Each time around we work through another layer. We deepen our experience and build upon the knowledge and wisdom previously gained.
Here is what the onion does not tell you: the peeling is not loss. Nothing is being taken off you. A layer comes away because you have grown large enough to live without it, and what is underneath was always there, waiting for the light to reach it. The same lesson arriving again is not evidence that you failed it the first time. It is evidence that you have grown enough to hear the harder version of it.
There is a part of you that keeps the ledger. It writes learned next to a lesson and closes the book, because an open book means more work and it has carried enough already. That part is not lazy. It is trying to give you somewhere to rest. The trouble is that it files wisdom the way we file a paid bill, and wisdom is not a bill. It is a practice, and a practice left alone goes dormant. So when the same issue surfaces again, that part hears an accusation and braces for it. You can tell it the truth: no one is grading you. The lesson came back around because you are ready for the next layer of it.
Rereading will not do it. Neither will this blog. You can recite something you once lived by while you are driving to work, break it before dinner, and the reciting will have cost you nothing and changed nothing. What relearns a lesson is practicing it somewhere inconvenient, in front of someone who is watching. That is far slower than reading, and there is no version of it you get to finish.
I’ve been absent from blogging these last few days as I’ve been simplifying, including cleaning out my ridiculous amount of books, and in that weeding out I came across The Four Agreements. Don Miguel Ruiz published it in 1997, four agreements drawn from Toltec teaching. The Four Agreements is one truth system that I lived and breathed for a good while, and it’s still an undercurrent. But perhaps another layer of the onion is called for. Perhaps you’ll join me on this journey. Stay tuned for the next four blogs as we unwrap the four agreements needed to have more love and happiness in your life:
- Be Impeccable with your word.
- Don’t take anything personally.
- Don’t make assumptions.
- Always do your best.
Whatever you already know and have stopped doing is not gone. It is under the next layer, and you will come around to it again.
May you remember the deep wisdom and learning that is already yours.
May that wisdom soften your own suffering and the suffering of others.