After the Chaos

February 11, 2022

I have been in a state of teeth-gnashing irritation over the freedom-stealing mandates ever since the Covid Roadshow erected its tents nearly two years ago. Nothing new there, and certainly not unique to me.

I suspect that this period has been tumultuous and fruitful in the way spring storms, followed by spaded earth, followed by planting seeds can be fruitful. When I notice a seedling poking up from those fertile rows, I pounce upon it, hovering, encouraging, hoping.

Am I finally learning what I’m supposed to be learning? Has all the tumult and upheaval yielded a nugget of self-awareness? 

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It occurred to me today, contemplating the notion of self-love, that the only thing preventing me from routinely treating myself with kindness, respect, and compassion, is…me. 

Now wait a minute! Wouldn’t the opposite of self-love be self-destruction? I’m pretty sure I’m not self-destructive. At least, not now. At least, not consciously. 

Certainly not in the overt, riding-a-motorcycle-without-a-helmet kind of way, or throwing the dice over at the casino with your final paycheck in your pocket, or the other myriad ways we gaily throw caution to the wind in the name of fun and freedom.

It’s more insidious and sly. It’s the sibilant murmur just below consciousness, tossing up words and phrases like Nessie surfacing from the Loch Ness. A little disparagement here, a bit of impatience there. Why didn’t you take care of that problem? Why did you let it become a huge issue when you could’ve easily dealt with it months ago? Boy, are you ever lazy!…on and on flow the poison words, black sludge from a toxic wound.

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I recall someone wise once saying, Look at the way you’re talking to yourself. Would you ever talk like that to another person?

Probably not. And yet, I still haven’t mastered the base level of kindness. Unwavering, unconditional kindness to self. At all times, no matter what. 

It seems an incredibly tall order. I wonder if being diligent with kindness to others depletes what feels like the finite supply I have to dispense. Intellectually, I believe kindness, as a tangible aspect of love, is infinite and ever-flowing. In practice, I dole it out and if there’s none left in the hopper, I shortchange myself before someone else.

It’s discouraging to discover this about myself, or rediscover it, since I seem to keep circling through the same epiphanies, promptly forgetting them until days or years later, without any recollection that I’ve already visited this pungent heap of self-examination, not once but probably several times over the decades.

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I suspect that one reason that I find the authoritative mandates restricting my personal freedom to be so infuriating is that they are like watching my authoritative treatment of myself, unavoidably splashed in full color on the widescreen, dialogue and pounding music assaulting my senses.

These outward restrictions and mandates on your behavior can’t hold a candle to the way you’ve been mandating yourself all these years.

This might be one facet of sovereignty that I haven’t addressed. What good is it going to do me to have all those mandates lifted, to be freed at last from the onerous outer controls, if I’m still allowing an inner, self-depreciating dialogue to run the program that is me?

Perhaps the mandates that really need to be lifted are the ones I have laid upon myself, or allowed to be laid upon me through circumstance and experience over this lifetime.

A great big rueful sigh, there. And another door cracking open in the hallway that is leading, I really am sure, to personal freedom.

A freedom that is mine, no matter what mandates or restrictions are imposed or lifted in the outside world where I walk the planet in my borrowed Earth suit.

A few more seedlings are poking up in the fertile rows after the chaos. I look up from the field of my life, look past the fences, onward and outward. The fields are all sprouting new green, and everywhere, all can begin to celebrate.