Life is Amazing and Sometimes it's Not

Life is Amazing and Sometimes it’s Not

Sometimes I wake up sad for no good reason.

Sometimes I lose my patience and yell at my kids.

Sometimes I feel fat.

Sometimes I get my feelings hurt and take things personally, even when I know they weren’t meant that way.

Sometimes I don’t sleep well because I’m having night sweats.

Sometimes I’m crabby because I’m having hot flashes (do you see a trend here?). 

Sometimes I invite in a bad mood instead of doing the 37 things I know I could do to make myself feel better.

Sometimes even if there are a million cool things to do, I sit home all day and wallow. 

The next time you think someone is living their FaceBook life 24/7, remember that they probably feel more like you do than their home page might imply.

In other words, life is amazing and sometimes it’s not.

I felt like starting with that little confession because there are a lot of incredible things happening in my life right now, but I am also human and living in Spain is not an escape from that. Instead it’s an invitation to pay attention to all the ways I’m human, which isn’t always FaceBook pretty.

One of the things I’ve noticed is how obsessive I can get around planning. I’ve been organizing a lot of excursions lately. The notion that planning a vacation could cause stress is hilarious. It’s the same roller coaster I get on at home where I say yes, yes, yes to all things wonderful and then stress about how to make them all happen. Many of the amazing, fantastic, life-affirming things we do take a lot of work to organize and I often wonder if the end result puts me ahead in terms of life satisfaction or whether by the time I get through it, I’ve just broken even. I’m recalling the line from the Bhagavad Gita - no effort is ever wasted. It reminds me that it’s all in the doing. So I’m working on how to do it versus whether to do it. 

There are moments of incredible aliveness that don’t happen if the space for them isn’t created in the first place (like in August when we rented a car and took an incredible road trip through Northern Spain where we saw mind bending, 12th century churches and stunning Atlantic coastlines in Galicia, rock-climbed 30 meters up to look down upon unbelievably picturesque pastoral meadows in Asturias and ate the absolute best food ever created in Bilboa). And there are also the spontaneous moments of aliveness that don’t happen if we are always busy worrying about or planning for the future (like last week when we went out for a hike, stumbled upon a rope swing at the rivers edge and jumped into ice cold water, leaving us breathless and awed as we floated on our backs and took in the light flickering through the cottonwoods). 

I’m working on making space for both. Lorin Roche’s Radiance Sutras, are helping me. Here is a verse I’m meditating on:

“I am everywhere, infusing everything.

To find me,

Become absorbed in intense experience.

Go all the way.

Be drenched in the energies of life.

Enter the world beyond separation.”

Here’s to being drenched in the energies of life!