Evolve into Happiness: Your Fear Will Not Eat You
Typically, when I feel called to write the words arrive in a barely containable flow. I capture as fast as I can with my meager typing skills and by the end I’m partially content with the accuracy of the result. This is exponentially true when trying to make sense of the dance that happens so close to the line between life and death. If there is such a thing as a reality trigger warning, consider yourself warned.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve paid increased attention to how close to that life and death line I’ve had to dance in my life, especially recently. While I honor that we are made of stardust subject to the universal flow, I love my life. I love being alive. I want to always revel in the ride that I am on this particular rock at this particular time.
Often the ride we are on has high highs and low lows and occasionally takes a turn we could never expect. When life takes those turns, we often hear well-wishers encourage us to embrace the “new normal.” The “new normal” is deceiving because there was never “normal” in the first place. You were just in the situation that your life experiences hadn’t fucked up the bell curve yet. Not everyone finds they have become an outlier during their lifetime, but when you do I guarantee that it will shake you to your quantum level. Life doesn’t prepare you to be an outlier. You have to figure that out on your own and in your own way.
We can interpret our experiences as bad or good, as negative or positive, as undeserved or deserved, but ultimately those mental gymnastics will land us in a broken state of mind. When things change, they change forever. Your suffering will endure as long as you resist adapting to your shifting reality. Your experiences are your experiences and to the extent you can twist and shape those balloons into a crown as best you can, well, you win. The darkness doesn’t go away.
I said it pointedly to myself and put into print, “It will suck to hear, but you have no entitlement to your dream.” As I reread it, I resist my own words. I want my dream. I’ve dripped sweat for my dream. I’ve bled for my dream. I’ve been in and sat vigil at hospital beds for my dream. And for all the dues I’ve supposedly paid, here I am oppressed by the same question, “What do you want?”
Answering that question before was never accurate. It’s taken the sum total of my life so far to actually answer that now. I want love. I want peace. I want the humans I surround myself with to be happy, not for me but for them. I want to share my world with people willing to sweat and bleed for their dream and be excited to push me to do that in return. That’s it.
Yet I know for fact that my interpretation of my experiences is the only way I can shape my life. The darkness and lightness will always be there. I also know I only ever have control over myself. It is the constant silent mindfuck of life: Your happiness is your choice. My happiness is my choice.
Whether you are at peace or suffering now or ever, it comes down to your spiritual warrior skills. A dear one in the deepest depths of navigating love, life, and death shared a quotation that I’ll paraphrase here that snapped me out of my post-life-and-death-moment haze. It said, “All suffering exists due to our discomfort with change and unmet expectations instead of savoring the experience of the magic of the moment.”
Presently humans are not built to be in the moment. Our current evolutionary lot is fear-based around escaping saber-toothed tigers. When we encounter fear in the 21st century version, we still experience the same fight or flight reaction we had when eye to eye with the tiger that leaves us bereft of our ability to manage our emotions. It is only in my recognizing my own version of running for my survival that I realized I have more spiritual warrior skills than my evolutionary predecessor had.
So there it is: Your fear will not eat you. My fear does not threaten my survival. I am emotionally strong, spiritually nimble, and evolutionarily capable of savoring the magic of the moment. I am enriched by dancing close to the line between life and death and letting that shape me in ways that help me acknowledge the darkness and live in the light. I choose mastery over circumstance. I am so much stronger than experiences dictating my future. No longer clinging to “normal,” “new” or otherwise, I welcome the practice to adapt to change and trash my expectations to allow for the fluid energetic exchange with the universe.
It may be minutes, days, weeks, years that I continue to stare down that emotional saber-toothed tiger, yet I welcome the challenge of the evolutionary wrestling with myself. Dancing in the moment in all its stumbles, missteps, and rare glory is worth my effort. I still marvel that I’ve made it this far, I might as well choose happiness for the rest of the way.
*This article was originally posted on Medium on May 22, 2017.
