There are three possible responses to real or imaginary challenges:
1)
fight,
2)
flee, or
3)
face up.
It's the third possible response which interests me. What facing up
really is is becoming present to the situation. The first two, fight or
flight, are for the most part automatic responses. There's
nothing wrong
with either of them. We're constructed to respond this way from time to
time. It's what ensures our safety and our survival. Literally, it's
what comes with the package. But what facing up brings which is
new, which doesn't come with the package is accountability,
responsibility, and possibility. This is
who I am.
This is what's happening. I'm responsible for this. Now
what?
These realizations are the very stuff of
transformed
living. They don't
create
themselves, neither do you have a right to them, and neither are they
easy to wrestle with. If
transformation
were easy, wouldn't the entire world be
transformed
by now?
Ask: What's my choice here? What possibility can I invent here?
Whatever the answers to these questions are, asking them allows
something new to emerge, something more than simply a hormonal
endrocrinal keyed response for which no one except your own
clockwork-ness can take any credit.
Notice you can't answer these questions
authentically
and neither will anything new
show up
until
get present
to the situation and face up to the challenge - fight and flight are
not options. It's not just that you can't have a worthwhile inquiry
when no one is at home. It's that the problem state, whatever the
problem is, is always axiomatically
congruent with
the über-conversation "This isn't it".
Simply by facing up to it, the problem state is vanquished. Nothing
changes out there, yet the missing link -
presence
(or listening, if you will) - returns. Someone is at home. The
train is in the station.
It's OK the way it is,
and there's choice in the matter of the future again.
What stops you living a life you love is not the past you had but the
future you don't have. What makes for living a life you
love is inventing
a future worth living
into.