I'll Take Door #2 For the Win, Alex
Reading time: 1 minute, 20 seconds.
Socrates said the moment we admit our ignorance we take the first step towards wisdom. I remember my “first step” so clearly, you could divide my life into two—before and after.
BEFORE STEP
Life before was what most people would consider ideal, as far as the world of appearances goes. I was twenty-something with a happy marriage, good friends, strong family connections, a promising career, enough travel to satisfy my wanderlust, and the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood. I believed my gratitude attitude and spirituality were the reasons for this abundance. They helped me to trust life, focus on the positive, and view everything as a growth opportunity. If I was ignorant, it was definitely the blissful kind.
👉🏻 Enter shit storm. My mother died, followed by a bunch of others, and everything blasted open. I tried to lean on my spirituality, the one thing I believed would always be there for me, but it turned on me like Wile-E-Coyote’s dynamite blaster.
My worldview was blown to bits, along with everything else. At this point, three doors appeared in front of me:
DOOR #1: drown myself in whatever distraction/noise/numbing device/over-activity I can find to avoid the Who-Am-I-Really question. (Wow, how will I ever choose?—the world offers so many options! I’m talking about you, Chardonnay.)
DOOR #2: admit my answers, spirituality, self, life, and pretty much everything else aren’t big enough to hold me anymore and do what it takes to go deeper, wider.
DOOR #3; go jump off the tallest nearby cliff (tempting).
I’ll take Door #2 for the win, Alex! (With maybe just a bit of that Door #1 thrown in there, too.)
THE STEP
So I dove deeper… A LOT DEEPER… and, wow, the things I found there. Behind the happy contentment was a nagging sense of discontent, behind the positivity was old, repressed anxiety and sorrow, behind the strong family unit was brokenness, and behind the perfect life was the perfect lie. This life I’d been living wasn’t even mine! It was the life everyone else wanted for me. I always knew this on a subconscious level, of course, but it’s easy to keep the truth sublimated when you are more practiced at sublimating than you are at becoming aware of what you aren’t yet aware.
Maybe it wasn’t so much a step as a big-a** boot to WAKE-UP!!
Crises are good for that.
They kick us through doors we’re avoiding.
AFTER STEP
My external/internal lives did a complete 180. I left my career, eventually got divorced, and long story short, I realized admitting ignorance isn’t a One&Done. If you’re truly committed to freedom, admitting you don’t know ANYTHING becomes a way of life. Whatever you think you know, whatever beliefs and assumptions you have about who you are, who others are, what life is about, what a coronavirus is, what the past is, what the future is, what the mind is, what the body is, what spirituality looks like, what success is, what zen is, what enlightenment is, what the afterlife is, who Jesus and Buddha were, what they were talking about, what these words I’m writing mean—all that’s gotta go. ALL OF IT. Into a flaming dumpster. As the Ancient One in the movie Dr. Strange says: “Your intellect has taken you far in life, but it will take you no further. Surrender….”
Why? Because although the mind loves itself some thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, no thought or belief can tell you the truth about who you really are. Or anyone else for that matter.
In reality, this “you” that’s trying so hard to know things, understand, be zen, seem smart, get somewhere, be holy and spiritual, is just another story. Look closely and be ruthlessly honest.
THIS, Freedom, Here, Now.
That is what you are. Everything else is just a mind narrative.
Booyah,
KB
