It is Life

I saw it this way...by Janice Brown

It’s not always going to be a challenge, it’s not always going to be easy; it is life.

Once in a while, you’re going to look at your life and understand something differently; you’re going to see it with a fresh set of eyes, and that’s when you know you’re on the right track.

And right track doesn’t have to mean the only way; it often just means you have come to a new awareness of who you are being in the moment, your highest self, or the one you take to the lobby of the finest hotel and say, ‘Yessss! I’ve finally made it!’ That guy doesn’t really understand the mechanism of exploring life from the inside out.

It's the ‘Yes, I’ve finally made it, guy!’ that sees this in the parking lot of the grocery store when they have a new sense of wellbeing, or the parking lot of the local library, or the forest floor of their very own neighbourhood; those are the times and places you’ll come to know something with perfect clarity.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but if you take the law of averages, it’s going to be an average day where you can simply sit down and say, ‘Yup, this is good. This is enough.’ This doesn’t mean settling for less; this means perfect awareness of being alive and well in your bones. Of being in complete alignment with your next step and putting down the battlefield struggle for a simple moment of pleasure and recognition.

It means, 'I will' if you can, and 'I will' if you can’t. It is not reliant or dependent upon any other reason than being the self in the moment. And that’s a pretty fine day when you can say, ‘Yes, life is good, no matter what I see going on around me.’

I can not stress this enough; you can have the rug ripped right out from under your feet and still be ok with it. You can have your face bruised and bloody from tripping over your own two feet on the sidewalk and walk away with a chuckle in your heart instead of condemnation. You can clank into someone and know that they are being who they are in the moment, and that moment was meant for you no matter what else happens the rest of your day.

You can absolve an old friend, you can absolve yourself, you can absolve the green stain on the white carpet; you don’t have to abstain from anything in your life to be good and pure and devoid of evil thinking. And evil thinking is a misnomer. It is simply an awareness of doubt in such an obscure way of thinking that desperation breaks through and rules all sense of being in awarenss.

This is the low point of being in experience, and once you see this, you can know with certainty that there is another way to see things. You can even say to yourself, ‘Holy smacks! That was a close one!’ Or perhaps, 'Oh God, here we go again!’ and decide not to. That’s the power of who you are in choice and awareness. It’s not being a money-grubbing Hellian, it’s also not being a pure-white Pollyanna, it is being comfortable knowing that you can have the full experience of living and being who you are even if you have a crap thought from time to time.

Now having crap thoughts and acting out crap thoughts are entirely different things, and this is what you come into awareness of as you are developing your tuning fork of awareness. You are a tuning fork, a device with such complete awareness that even the slightest graze pulls your attention to it and you make a sound—an imperceptible sound.

I saw it this way: It’s not like you think it’s going to be, this coming into your full awareness; not skipping through the field of flowers on bliss-filled days. It’s dropping your brand new ice cream cone and turning around and getting another one. It’s waiting for the light to change and realizing you have been daydreaming because someone honked the horn behind you and not taking offence to this abrupt awakening. It’s yearning for a new flavour of life and folding up the deck completely in the old one and stepping onto a Ferris wheel and finding out it’s a train.

Life is quirky. Life is weird. And some days you’re going to rocket to the moon and find yourself among the stars, like someone once said. But other days you’ll be looking at a crack in the sidewalk with such keen interest that you’ll look foolish to those around you. Why is that?

Simply because they expect you to behave a certain way, and anything outside the scope of what you’ve always done suddenly rings alarm bells. Why should anyone worry about your own state of mind when you do that enough for yourself all the time? All the damn day long. That’s what has been going on your whole life. And that’s what we need to sort out.

Why do you think you’re so wrong or such a failure because you have not achieved ‘xyz’? It’s not just because you have forgotten who you are; it’s because you’ve never given yourself a chance to see beyond your local awareness. And local awareness only knows doubt and distortion; high awareness opens you up to a new way of thinking. And that is all we are ever talking about, how you perceive your day through a certain sort of narrow field of view or a certain sort of widening and broadening field of view.

It couldn’t be simpler, and it couldn’t be more challenging in the moment. And that, my friends, is life; simple and sudden awareness suddenly transposed and transformed over your Heart and Mind in a new sense of wellbeing without explanation or reason that you can definitively say. And that is enough to know that you are on the right track—not the crisp hundred-dollar bill in your hand or the dour look of disapproval on your face.

It's a certain gentleness and ease with what is occurring around you. This is a softening of the field, a blurring of the lines, an opening of hope in the Heart, and that day is the one you’ll love the best. Funny thing is, it’s probably already happened, and you probably didn’t even see it when it came by and sat on your lap, or licked your face, or dropped a raindrop on your nose. But it’s come to visit you more often than it has left you in a lurch.

Just open your Heart up one small crack and let a sliver of light in, and you’ll see you are pretty darn wonderful after all.

You’ve got this. There’s no doubt about it.

I saw it this way.

~ A Girl

I’ve been working with the Tao as long as I’ve lived; and so have you. Here’s what that means to me, I’m a problem solver and I use the Tao as a framework for my discussion. In my writing and my work, I share with you how I use it, and you can decide if that’s helpful for you or not.

Janice writes from the Heart in the moment. She writes specifically from her point of view. You may not have seen it this way before, but that's the whole point—to turn it around and look at it another way.