I have been arguing with Reality lately. Honestly, there are certain things about it that I just don’t like and I think ought to be changed and rearranged.
And sometimes, I have done just that. I’ve lit the green candle and the special incense imported from an exotic small country, chanted the mantra to the abundance deity and called forth some new improved version of my reality.
Small things like the too expensive pair of shoes I lusted after that turned up at a yard sale still nestled in its original shoe box for five dollars. Or bigger desires like the lover I manifested from a list of spiritual and physical qualities.
Biggest: A soul mate and the life changing desire for the child I yearned for and finally delivered after five serious life-threatening miscarriages.
And then what happened? Reality asks.
Then you knocked on the door when the glitter settled. The coveted shoes were too narrow and hurt my feet; they ended up in the back of the closet with the two dozen other pairs of shoes I wanted and wanted and wanted.
Then the lover I drew to me turned cruel and selfish.
The daughter I longed for with every cell of my being left home at seventeen to settle in a foreign country 8,000 miles away.
And my soul mate, after decades of marriage, has expanded my capacity for love and compassion, but did I understand that those lessons are learned through dark times of uncertainty, of poor health and running out of money the way some people run out of milk? Did I know the price tag for what I was calling into being?
And then? Reality asks, leaning in the doorway.
Then I think I must have made a mistake, I did something wrong, I forgot to ask for perfect health or financial abundance or shoes that fit or a daughter who would live next door. Or a marriage with no shadow or sorrow.
I forgot to factor in change, how there’s no stopping time and saying ok, I like this moment, let’s keep it.
I forgot that Reality is a steady stream of now and now and now and what I call into my life will also keep changing minute by minute. How what I thought I wanted was a two-dimensional picture of happily ever after that skated over how long it takes to learn kindness and patience with another. Or the times I forced the story to fit into the mold of what I thought would fulfill me that turned into a minor disaster.
I am looking at all the ways I have been imagining that my life could be improved, all the desires I was about to launch out into the universe asking for express delivery.
Suddenly I am reluctant to light the green candle and address the goddess of abundance. What’s actually wrong with this moment that I’m in such a hurry to change it?
Maybe what I really want is to slow down long enough to bless this moment overflowing with the abundance of enoughness. Enough shoes at the back of my closet for many lifetimes. Enough food and shelter. Enough, more than enough, love shared with my family. Enough sunshine to grow a small garden. Clean air. Water from the tap. Enough peace to pray for the wellbeing of those unable to escape the slaughter happening right now across the globe.
Where is the sweetness of this life, right now, as I am breathing it in and out, that I am overlooking in my endless quest for something better?
We’ve been sold the lie that this life is not enough, and that it is our right, our obligation to want more as we seek to optimize our lives, but this moment in its huge smallness is all we have.
This now is where we come to talk with spirit, to sit in the stillness for even a moment and fall into the holy presence that waits for us to stop scrambling on the escalator of going nowhere fast.
This moment is when the noise that has been drowning out the small voice of our heart can speak its true desires, free from ambition to change or be anywhere else. This is when the heart whispers I have been waiting for you to find your way back to now, to your radiant being complete and whole just as you are.
This is when enough is the path to the center of the animate singing universe, to the love that sustains us and is always waiting to welcome us home.
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Read more stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging available from Amazon.
