The title of this blog is "Being Into The Journey." In so naming it, I am attempting to identify a quality of our participation in events which speaks to a sense of presence and of awareness. The popular word we could use is "mindfulness" which captures the dual capacity of being aware of something, really aware, and also the added quality of not-having-to-do-anything-about-what-it-is-that-you-are-aware-of-in-this-moment-and-in-this-moment-and-this-moment.
There is more to our awareness, however, than "just" awareness. There is also a sense of events, of past and of future, and of continuity and discontinuity. Another way of saying this is that we have an ability, on reflection, to see not only events, but also themes around which certain events cluster. These themes may be connected in an obvious way, or they may not. And that is where things get even more interesting.
They become more interesting because they can be connected on a different level with what we could call a narrative. The narrative is a story, or perhaps we could call it a story of stories. That sounds too complicated but it doesn't have to be when you realize that we are all driven to find patterns to our experiences. We long for them.
But remember that these narratives are still stories which we tell ourselves (and others if we choose to) which help us to make sense of our world, of our life, and of our place in it. As a story, it is important to know that is is just that, a story. It is not the truth, or the whole truth. It is a story that we tell ourselves to help us to navigate through life. We hold onto the story, the narrative for as long as it is helpful.
There may be one narrative which we present to the "world," or our audience du jour. That story may be closely reflective of the inside story, or it may be just a story, a narrative which is conjured up to create and maintain an impression, for whatever purpose. Hollywood specializes in this but you don't have to be there to see it; it's all around. Another variant is heard in the statement: "that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!"
I am all for holding onto something that is "working," and that is useful, and which helps us along in our lives. But when we become too enamoured of a particular story, a particular narrative, and that narrative is no longer serving us well in the sense of our own personal evolution, development, growth, etc., we engage in a daily practise of sacrificing our life energy in the service of maintenance of a once-useful-but-progressively-less-useful pattern of life. It becomes a phase of life-interruptness.
It is precisely at that point where and when we have an opportunity to let go of the old and to explore the new with a freshness and curiosity. That becomes the transition point. It is a stage where we remain open to our experiences in the sense of not automatically relegating them to our usual way of experiencing and categorizing. We hold the experience open is a sense. We listen and look and feel in a different way. That way has been there all along but we may have lost contact with it through a process of encrustation. The crust holds things together, but it also blocks new material or awareness, etc., from entering.
This process of re-engaging with life and the practices and processes that enhace it all are, in this context, explored on a daily basis, and they constitute The Daily Journey.
Stay tuned. Let's see how this all develops.
Tim Hodgens
