Credit: designwebidentity.com
It takes a lot to see our preferred way of being.
A lot rides on camouflaging it from those who’d sabotage us. Well, at least in Third Dimensionality.
But that would be our conditioning – to be somewhat guarded about revealing or discussing our preferred way of being.
We talk about it as our comfort zone, our game (as in being put off our game), our style, the way we be with things.
As it gets busier for us, the mere pace of things can put us off our game or threaten to drag us away from our preferred way of being.
I notice it getting busier in my life on every front. And every step I take in any direction seems to promise more stress, more involvements, more promises right now. I’ll have to master how to be with these situations because this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I feel like I’m in compression. Going down into the deep.
My preferred way of being is that … I was about to list it and I realized that almost anyone could say the same thing … I see myself as tolerant, not easily rattled, courageous, etc.
Of course, I’m not. I’m easily rattled. And if you listened to the judgments that knock around in my head on a simple bus ride home, you’d start to smell a constructed self.
It’s exactly that it is a constructed facade, and not a very convincing one, that should alert me to the necessity of letting it go in the face of a busier pace of life rather than trying to hold on. Why hold on to my preferences, opinions, desires, if I’ve chosen to work on building Nova Earth? Can one not predict it will get incredibly busy? Is that not like being dragged over a corduroy road?
If I’m to master change, I can’t be holding on to my preferences. Each one of them is an anchor sunk deep in the sea floor.
The masters told us about these situations. Sosan talked about letting go of all preferences. (1) We’re in a land without footholds, as St. John of the Cross described it. (2) Karma yogis say that the sevak, or one who serves, should be detached in all things. Let go, let go, let go is the recurring message.
A master of change is beginning to look like a master of letting go. It’s that or go insane.
I think that many people, in practicing leadership, crash on these rocks: They want what they want, not what they get. But masters of change will need to want what they get, in order to stay sane and unstressed for the sake of the work.
Anyone can step off the carousel at any point when they’ve simply had enough. It’s really a matter between us and ourselves whether we stay on the carousel or not. Those that stay on, I think, besides being committed, will have to have mastered change.
Footnotes
(1) “The Great Way is effortless
For those who live in choiceless awareness.
To choose without preferences
is to be clear.” (Sosan, The Book of Nothing. A Song of Enlightenment. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2002, 16.)
(2) “Without a foothold you must seek Him out.” St. John of the Cross in Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, trans. Complete Works of St. John of the Cross. Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1973, 89.