From time to time when I'm not present to who I really am, my life
shows up like a soap opera. That's when I'm dramatizing, entangled in
the drama, the epic saga of it all. Occasionally I'm in the audience,
absorbed, watching myself in the soap opera of my life. Sometimes I'm a
critic reviewing the soap opera of my life, commenting on
the plot, opining about the outcome, voting on its
authenticity and on its fairness.
Yet who I really am is none of the above. When my life
shows up like a soap opera, when I show up dramatizing the epic saga
of my life, when I show up like I'm in the audience watching myself in
the soap opera of my life, or when I show up like a critic of the soap
opera of my life, a critical distinction has gone soft.
That's when a key context for living is no longer decisive
or present.
There's a context which, by its presence alone, distinguishes
living life from the soap opera of it. I'm committed
forever to being a stand for that context. I'm committed forever to
being a
clearing
in which that context can be distinguished. I'm committed forever to
being a friend of distinction.
When you got it you got it. When you
haven't got it you haven't got it. As soon as you get you haven't got
it, you get it again.
Can you get it and keep it
forever?
I'll lose it, and I'll recreate it again soon enough. As soon as I do,
I get my life back even while the four thousand and seventeenth episode
of the soap opera has come right back after the break and
continues to seduce its audience.
But this time I'm living my life again and not merely back
on stage acting in the scripted drama, the story, the stürm und
drang (aka "snot and tears") soap operatic circumstances of
my life. Returning to this way of authentically being
becomes possible once I've redistinguished who I really am -
context - from the meaningless soap operatic circumstances
of my life - content.
To one degree or another, we're all trapped in the soap opera of our
lives, blindly rooted in its believability, righteously
defending and justifying our role in it, unable to distinguish the soap
opera from life or vice versa, unaware we're the authors of its script
and not merely actors whose lives are predetermined by it.
And all the while the soap opera goes further and further into
syndication and is contracted to go on forever, episode after
episode, season after season, rerun after rerun after rerun.