Everyone has a story: a motley collection of memories, fantasies, inventions that become "true" over time.My story is totally unreal and non-existent...I keep it alive because I have made it my identity.This is me...this is my life!
I nurture my story with great care. Endlessly I repeat the incidents, the memories, the people, the actions,the achievements, the happenings...partly based on the past that actually was, partly embellished by me with suitable imagination to look and sound good in the telling. After a while, even the embellishments become real to me...repetition gives them reality of sorts.
So what's wrong with my building a story and identifying with it? After all, it gives me character, personality, makes me who I am...gives me something to talk about at the party or the cafe...jokes and funny happenings and adventures and excitement that I can impress my listeners ( and myself) with. The older I get, the more I cling to my story...old friends shudder when I repeat that incident in the bar in Germany for the umpteenth time.
Finally, battered by Life's roller-coaster, I realise that my story is a willow-the-wisp, a mirage. And this mirage is keeping me from truly living...fresh and new and aware in each new moment of each new day.
Yet, even after I discover this tremendous truth...how hard it is to drop my story! Because this means - " I' must DIE!
I must cut off my head, destroy my carefully crafted and nurtured self-image, say goodbye to Mickey forever!
It takes a lot of practice..and self-awareness...to clearly see that killing good old Mickey is the ONLY real choice I can make...if I truly want to BE. This story I have clung to all my life is choking me, strangling me, encasing me in a shell of armour that cuts me off from magic, from Life.
When I manage to escape from this shell, if only for a few moments, I taste the vastness, the bliss, the peace of infinity and the pulsing energy of Love that pervades everything around me.
I experience being tree and mountain and ocean, the great expanding cosmos, the whirling atom and the blossoming flower.
Mr Drop tastes being Mr. Ocean...who wants to be drop anymore?
Goodbye, story...off with his head!
Enough is more than enough.
I nurture my story with great care. Endlessly I repeat the incidents, the memories, the people, the actions,the achievements, the happenings...partly based on the past that actually was, partly embellished by me with suitable imagination to look and sound good in the telling. After a while, even the embellishments become real to me...repetition gives them reality of sorts.
So what's wrong with my building a story and identifying with it? After all, it gives me character, personality, makes me who I am...gives me something to talk about at the party or the cafe...jokes and funny happenings and adventures and excitement that I can impress my listeners ( and myself) with. The older I get, the more I cling to my story...old friends shudder when I repeat that incident in the bar in Germany for the umpteenth time.
Finally, battered by Life's roller-coaster, I realise that my story is a willow-the-wisp, a mirage. And this mirage is keeping me from truly living...fresh and new and aware in each new moment of each new day.
Yet, even after I discover this tremendous truth...how hard it is to drop my story! Because this means - " I' must DIE!
I must cut off my head, destroy my carefully crafted and nurtured self-image, say goodbye to Mickey forever!
It takes a lot of practice..and self-awareness...to clearly see that killing good old Mickey is the ONLY real choice I can make...if I truly want to BE. This story I have clung to all my life is choking me, strangling me, encasing me in a shell of armour that cuts me off from magic, from Life.
When I manage to escape from this shell, if only for a few moments, I taste the vastness, the bliss, the peace of infinity and the pulsing energy of Love that pervades everything around me.
I experience being tree and mountain and ocean, the great expanding cosmos, the whirling atom and the blossoming flower.
Mr Drop tastes being Mr. Ocean...who wants to be drop anymore?
Goodbye, story...off with his head!
Enough is more than enough.
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