zenjones

P.p. has been amazingly valuable in ways I did not anticipate. I’m surprised at how different the experience of the last month has been compared to what I thought it would be. I thought I would have lighthearted days of “being aware of hands” or something fun like that. But it wasn’t lighthearted at all. Being aware of conditioned behavior, believed thoughts, etc. is hard work.

What emerged for me was the awareness that The Five Questions have become more of a habit with me, especially “Can I think of this as my path?” I noticed this every day, but most recently in regard to our car. I found myself describing our car in the most derogatory way, and offending my husband. He picked it out and has cared for it assiduously over the past six years, so that it is almost never broken down, and so it (a 15-year-old American car) gets 30 miles to the gallon. If I’d had my way, we’d have bought a brand-new Prius a couple years ago, and would still be paying it off, and certainly we wouldn’t have saved nearly as much money on gas as it would have cost to buy it, and certainly buying a new car would be much more expensive in environmental terms than keeping this old one in good running shape.

But oh, I don’t like driving around in it. And oh, when certain friends make fun of it, I get very defensive. I want to put a sign in the window that says, “I could afford a Lexus if I wanted it.” And oh, I want it.

But it’s been the best lesson of conditioning. In my family we bought new cars every year. My poor parents lived under the constant stress of keeping up with those Joneses. My father would no more drive a 5-year-old car than he would walk down the streets of Rolling Hills naked. And that was a very deeply ingrained lesson.

So it is my path to see how important it is to me that perfect strangers think I’m successful. And to sit with my abject envy over Ann’s new car.

This is a season of so many endings for me. A dear friend that I will not see so much of now that I spend my weekdays in San Francisco gave me a paragraph from a book by Rachel Naomi Remen. It seemed to reflect my new found appreciation of accepting my path:

Most people have come to prefer certain of life’s experiences and deny or reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness. Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted… Beyond comfort lies grace, mystery, and adventure. We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life.

Here’s to grace, mystery, and adventure!