Seven Ways to Live in the End­less Moment

1. Now is all there is

If I had to con­dense down all of the client issues I’ve dealt with in 25 years, I would say it comes down to this: liv­ing in the past or the future is deadly.

It is easy to latch on to some tragedy from the past or pine for some glim­mer of hope in the future, and thereby to waste one’s life. Yet, the pull to look inside is strong.

Inside? Of course. No mat­ter how much you believe your ver­sion of your past story, no mat­ter how you imag­ine your future will be, it’s all a fan­tasy.

Noth­ing you think hap­pened,
hap­pened the way you think.
And noth­ing you imag­ine,
is going to work out
as you imagine.

The key to these seven ideas is how they relate to the sev­enth one. The Mid­dle Way is the Buddha’s dis­cov­ery. It lies between aus­ter­ity (starv­ing and abus­ing him­self) and excess (a life of lux­u­ri­ous, con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion.) Notice that the Mid­dle Way is not a replace­ment for the other two, but rather an accep­tance of all of it, by choos­ing the equa­nim­ity of the Middle.

It is so that we will end­lessly reflect upon our imag­ined past and imag­ined future. It is non-helpful to try to stop, and also non-helpful to give your­self grief for doing it.

2. Life isn’t fair

Shift (and shit…) hap­pens. If you think life is sup­posed to be fair, you are in for a rocky ride.

Life is, and all kinds of stuff hap­pens. Birth, liv­ing, death—and much of it out of our con­trol. I can guar­an­tee you will expe­ri­ence the death of oth­ers, includ­ing peo­ple you love. You will expe­ri­ence betrayal, often by peo­ple you love. You will be aban­doned, often by peo­ple you love. You will be unjustly blamed, judged, pun­ished. And then, you will die.

I know. You think you ‘should’ be spe­cial, and that stuff like this ‘shouldn’t’ happen—and espe­cially to you. After all, what did you do to deserve this? (I hear that exact line, often, from clients…)

Many peo­ple waste their lives try­ing to get oth­ers to treat them ‘right.’ Some­how,
a) it never hap­pens, and
b) they meet, again and again,
peo­ple who do not treat them right.

Maybe they are look­ing for the wrong thing.

3. No one is coming

I’ve writ­ten about this line before—it’s on a framed sign on my supervisor’s wall. Another ridicu­lous belief is that res­cue is coming—either in the form of a celes­tial cow­boy com­ing to end the world and take you off to live in the clouds, or in the earthly ver­sion of res­cue from the man or woman who will ‘com­plete you.’

Hol­ly­wood loves res­cue fan­tasies. The good guy saves the damsel in dis­tress, and van­quishes the bad­dies.

Nice. Not valid, but prevalent.

No one is com­ing. No one is going to make it all bet­ter for you. No one is going to cover the pud­dles of your life with their cloak.

Many of you will have been wast­ing your life try­ing to be ‘nice to oth­ers’ so they’ll be nice to you. Same idea. Sac­ri­fice your life for another, and they’ll do the same for you. Ever notice that it doesn’t work, you’re mis­er­able, feel­ing put upon, and no one has come to res­cue you? 

Back to # 2 – life isn’t fair. It’s not a zero sum game. Wait­ing for res­cue or giv­ing your life away in hopes that some­one will do the same for you is a mook’s game.

4. Be grateful

Most grat­i­tude is con­di­tional. As in, I’ll be grate­ful to you after you’ve done some­thing for me. You go first.

My mother-in-law has a needle­point in her bath­room. It’s of a bear look­ing into the mir­ror.
Text: “Smile!”
“You go first.”

I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post that my nature is to be some­what morose (god, I love that word…) and I notice that all I have to do is look at Dar­bella and I’m suf­fused in grat­i­tude. Because we accept each other as we are, not attempt­ing to fix each other, but sim­ply being with each other, grat­i­tude is what is left when the drama goes.

It’s easy to be grate­ful for stuff we judge to be good. Harder, much harder, to sim­ply be grate­ful for (as Zorba says) the whole cat­a­stro­phe. How can you be grate­ful for death, tragedy, sad­ness, betrayal?

Well, it’s one of those Mid­dle Way answers. If you bitch, moan and com­plain about it all, what changes? Grat­i­tude is not con­don­ing the evil that hap­pens. Rather, I am grate­ful for hav­ing sur­vived yet another les­son. In a sense, I am grate­ful for hav­ing (so far) sur­vived and learned.

Easy? NO! Essen­tial? YES!

5. Give it away

I want to give a shout-out to Skel­lie of skelliewag.org I read a lot of stuff on blogs, and her site and her style is amaz­ing. She did a free review of The Phoenix Cen­tre site, and the Blog, with the view to sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and util­ity. I imme­di­ately imple­mented all of her suggestions—she’s that good.

But what I like is her attitude—she sees giv­ing as a way of being of ser­vice, and assumes that such a life-choice ben­e­fits both her­self and oth­ers. In a sense, she’s Karmic, in the best sense of that idea—what goes around comes around.

Another shout-out to Hugh Johnston—he bought me cof­fee the other day, as we hadn’t seen each other in a while. Turned into a 3 hour gab fest, mostly around Hugh com­ing up with thoughts about me and my work. He self­lessly gave of his exper­tise, just because he wanted to.

Both Skel­lie and Hugh demon­strate this point:Your job is to give your­self away.

Now, of course, we all need to make a liv­ing. But most peo­ple tend to wait and wait to find the per­fect moment to be them­selves. They with­hold their pas­sion, their tal­ents, their gifts, wait­ing to be “appre­ci­ated.” Or, they get into the “I’m not doing this if I don’t get paid” mentality.

Again, remem­ber the Mid­dle Way. This not a paean to ‘free.’ It’s a sug­ges­tion, like all of these, to make yourself—your skills, knowl­edge, gifts—avail­able to those around you.

My mom, lovely woman that she was, was
a) a good cook, and
b) a lay min­is­ter.
I men­tion those two things together because,
a) when asked for a recipe, she’d agree, then leave out ingre­di­ents, so the per­son mak­ing the recipe would end up with some­thing ‘not quite as good.’
b) in all her years in the min­istry, she only she had 10 ser­mons to her name, which she trot­ted out when asked to preach. Peo­ple would ask her for a copy, and she’d refuse.

Now, here’s the punch-line. After she died, we cleaned out her ‘stuff.’ None of her ‘spe­cial’ recipes were writ­ten down. And she had a lit­tle lock box in her closet. In it were her 10 ser­mons, which we threw out, not know­ing what else to do with them. Thus, noth­ing sur­vived her.

6. Be passionate

Pas­sion is all about being engaged. Immersed. Over­come. To do so, you have to let down your guard­ed­ness, and tear into life and liv­ing, with verve and pleasure.

Many, many choose to dis­en­gageb based on fear­ing, “What will peo­ple think?” They are strongly pulled to pas­sion­ate, full, juicy liv­ing, and back off because of the pres­sure to conform.

Now, of course, there is a price to pay for being pas­sion­ate, and it is exactly the con­se­quences of liv­ing pas­sion­ately that lead so many to repress themselves.

I tend to be pretty clear about where I come from and what I expect of myself, and I am equally clear with my clients, cus­tomers, and friends. Many think I push the enve­lope way, way too much. I disagree.

7. Live the Mid­dle Way

Of course, this is all about liv­ing the Mid­dle Way. This path is about rec­og­niz­ing the fal­lacy of black and white, rules based liv­ing and think­ing. Most lives stall on the “What is the right way to live?” ques­tion. They stall because all that ever hap­pens is an inter­nal rehash­ing of the same old thoughts, dreams, fears.