My mother came over yesterday to look at the place next door which is vacant at the moment. The "For Lease" sign has been taken down but it is just sitting there vacant. Would it possibly be coming up for sale? Mum was interested in having a look and I encouraged her. I thought she might see how lucky she is with what she had just bought, not yet 9 months ago, just around the corner from us.
What struck me this morning as I looked out my bedroom window onto the roof of the house next door was that Mum would never be happy. She will never be satisfied with what she has. It will never be good enough and someone else will always have something better. Something she wants. This struck me as really important for me to understand. It reminded me of the Jamaican bob sledder movie I had just watched with my kids. Its message being it is not just winning that is important but whether you feel enough within yourself even when you do win. When there is a dissatisfaction, even when you do win, it shows that without winning you feel worthless. But this does not have to be so.
This is like Mum in her circumstances. She has not worked for most of her adult life, yet she has managed to buy a really nice house close to shops and us. It's clean and fresh and its on a huge block but she is not satisfied. It is not enough. She wants the place next door to us. This place is darker, older, in disrepair but she wants it because it is like ours - backs onto the bush (yes and ours is in disrepair too! hahaha). She only sees what she wants to see. She covets what others have. She may move in there and not be happy with that either. She is bored, she wants stimulation. She says that she misses the excitement of the process of buying and selling. She is not entirely settled.
When should you settle. When should it be enough. Should we always want more, aim for progress or should we be grateful for what we have? Should we be happy with our situation or should we expect more. Should we strive for whatever it takes to make ourselves better? I suppose there is a time for more and improving yourself and there is a time for settling with and knowing that this is to be enjoyed for the moment. Imagine if you were the gold medalist and you questioned your joy instead of living and being exhilarated in the moment. That would be dreadful. How long must it have taken you to get there and you can still question your joy. Even in that joyous moment there is no peace-no clam-no merging with ecstasy.
So too is it with our everyday lives. When we have been working towards something and we achieve it, there needs to be a celebration. A time of basking and bathing in the glory of the moment rather than questioning and criticizing what you didn't do right. How often do I allow myself to be joyful at a joyful moment or do I hold myself back? What can you be celebrating in your life today that you have not seen as a joy? Your arms, legs, mind, health, a roof over your head. What achievements have you made but forgotten to take the time to acknowledge? It is so easy to see what you don't have until that too is gone. We may become immune to what we already have.
Imagine if you came from a country where wars ragged and where life was counted in days rather than in years. Where fresh food and vegetables were hard to come by and where women were treated as property. Imagine no social security system or national health care. If you are to come at life from this perspective then what we have here in Australia is immense opportunity. We have relatively so much freedom and wealth, access to education, housing and freedom from poverty.
It is not that simply either. There is a relativeness about life that human nature gets caught up in. What surrounds us becomes the norm. When we are more than the norm we think we are doing well, when we are less than the norm we think we are not so well off. Where are you on the continuum. It all still comes down to perspective. Even in wealthier societies we can feel poor, less than, suffer violence, abuse, discrimination and dis-empowerment. It is important not to dismiss these perspectives as unimportant as they are real and live in the psyche of the society. This can be perpetuated by those in powerful positions either subconsciously or to consciously make themselves feel more than those that have less than them.
It all comes back to power and perspective. If life is viewed from a dis-empowered way it will be difficult for you to perceive opportunities and you may get stuck in "I can't" 'There is no point" or "It is no use" "What can a little soul like me do?" Alternatively you could blow you power out of proportion in a grandiose way of saving the world without changing your own world.
If we take the time to see what we do have, the simple yet powerful things we can begin to see our daily gifts.........and where our real power comes from like:
real life friendships, a tree in our garden, the ability to see the moon, a warm bed to sleep in, arms to hold a child with love, skin to feel love given, food to fill our bellies, access to education for our learning, our senses, our intuition, our soul, our direct access to the divine universe.
We need to summon our inner power, our inner spirit and nurture that so we can hold our head high in the material world of things rather than be defined by them. We are more than our material selves. Our spirit is the key to our sense of satisfaction, of knowing that we are enough, that we are more than enough. Our spirit and inner soul is enough. If we can perceive that and be empowered by that then anything in life is possible. If you feel inadequate now, you will still feel inadequate when you reach your perceived material goal. You need to be enough within yourself before you can feel rich and full and satisfied.
this doco was made by a blackheathen.
DAY
the word of the week, if you want a word, is STORM. this picture above these words is called TEACUPS IN A STORM. The picture is the result of a meditation on motherhood, why we weather the storm of life in isolated pockets, not quite able to help others, to busy bailing out our own teacup. An expansion of the idea of A STORM IN A TEACUP, which is a idiom meaning someone is exaggerating a problem, or making a small thing out to be much bigger than reality. I found myself thinking if families were in teacups in a storm on the sea, then the teacup would seem small and insignificant, but so fragile. By bringing the storm outside of the teacup we see that all the different families are weathering the same storm, would this storm be easier to weather in a larger vessel containing everyone? or have we rejected the idea of community (in the tribal sense) in favour of small family groups living separately?
This is like Mum in her circumstances. She has not worked for most of her adult life, yet she has managed to buy a really nice house close to shops and us. It's clean and fresh and its on a huge block but she is not satisfied. It is not enough. She wants the place next door to us. This place is darker, older, in disrepair but she wants it because it is like ours - backs onto the bush (yes and ours is in disrepair too! hahaha). She only sees what she wants to see. She covets what others have. She may move in there and not be happy with that either. She is bored, she wants stimulation. She says that she misses the excitement of the process of buying and selling. She is not entirely settled.
If we take the time to see what we do have, the simple yet powerful things we can begin to see our daily gifts.........and where our real power comes from like:
When I was a young child at school I made many spelling mistakes. There was no white out to correct them so I would start a new page. I had to do this quiet a lot. But every time I started a new page I would miss what the teacher was saying and I had to try to catch up. This would mean I would make more mistakes. I couldn't keep starting a new page again and again or I would have ended up with pages filled with meaningless scribble. There would be no substance to my work. Sometimes you have to accept the mistakes and move on. This is entirely different to just wanting to start something new every time you stuff up.
