Moving on, moment by moment

This is exactly what I needed to hear tonight (another blog quoting a third blog; it's neat how these connections work):

Another nice Buddhist blog; here's an excerpt from a post about choices:

We make choices about what we eat, where we live, who we interact with. Sure, if you are stuck in the current housing bubble, and you can't move out of your house or apartment, we could say that we do not have choices, but I think that is way too high up the abstraction ladder. The Buddha was about bringing it down, all the way down, to the right here, right now; when faced with THIS set of conditions what will I do? What will I say? What will I think? And it is this choice, in the moment, that will condition the next moment, and the next.

I've been hearing this for years, and each time I would think, "yes, of course, that's the way to do it."  At some level, there's been a part of me that knows what this means and has attempted to live my life that way, to varying degrees of success. For a long time, I've perceived a gap between how my life has been and how I want my life to be; and I couldn't quite put my finger on the missing piece that would bridge the gap. For the past year, it's felt as though I've been all around it, getting closer, but not quite there.

It has taken something pretty radical -- well, I've been told I'm hard-headed, so I guess it took something radical to get through -- but I've made the leap over the gap. Actually, how it felt to me right after the hurricane was that I was in free fall, and I had no choice but to spread my arms and let it do what it will. Talk about a major letting go of control. Or more accurately, a recognition that I had absolutely no control over anything except my own responses; and since during the first couple of weeks, my physical body was functioning on adrenaline, even that was iffy.

The more I look at this, I see that the turning point, the point at which my life changed irrevocably, was not the hurricane itself, the destruction and rendering homeless and so forth. The point of no return was the realization and then the acceptance that I (the ego? the mind?) have no control ... that it's not even about control ... and then the subsequent letting go, at very deep and basic levels of my being. What a relief. If I've been in free fall, this is the soft landing on firm ground.

During the second week after Katrina, I was staying with a family friend in Dallas, recovering from adrenal exhaustion and doing my best to take care of myself emotionally and physically so that I would be in shape to deal with the things ahead of me. One of the first things I did in Dallas was to make an appointment with a counselor to start addressing the PTSD. At that point, a lot of ideas for the future were percolating inside of me, but I was nowhere near ready to make major decisions or act on them. Some of my family members got very angry with me because to their eyes I wasn't "doing" anything, and my answer to their question "what are your plans?" was "I'm doing this moment by moment."

What's happened over the last month or so is that by holding to what I know, despite the disapproval and active resistance of the people around me, I am growing into simply and truly living moment by moment. There are two aspects to this that I can see right now. One aspect is looking at what's in front of me, at this precise moment, and making the choice needed about the next step, and only the next step. As AL said in the Breath By Breath blog entry quoted above, "when faced with THIS set of conditions what will I do? What will I say? What will I think? And it is this choice, in the moment, that will condition the next moment, and the next."  Yes yes yes yes yes.

This doesn't mean that I don't think about what I'd like to create or where I'd like to be, say, a year from now. What it does mean, among other things, is that the way to get there is through my "right now" choices. What I find happening is that, as I proceed on this basis, the more "long-term" process that I set in motion by my intention seems to take on a life of its own.

The other aspect to living moment by moment is taking conscious responsibility for each choice that I make. What I can see is that by taking responsibility for my choices  -- "owning" them, if you will -- I am experiencing a much greater commitment to my life and a more authentic and intimate way of relating to others. I am also able to recognize more clearly and quickly when and how particular relationships or ways of relating don't work.

From where I'm sitting now, I almost want to ask, how else can one live? This is not a matter of some idealistic spiritual or philosophical abstraction, "hey, that sounds great" but you don't really believe it can apply in real life. Doggone it, this is real life. This is how it works, as a matter of practical reality.

Comments

[marlaine]

it's weird to think...but your position at the moment seems enviable
not the part about the devastation...but the part about really being able to live for the moment, and from moment to moment
just enjoy :)
xo

[Kitty]

Yes, you're absolutely right. It's really a paradox. My intention (my challenge, should I decide to accept it ... well, I guess I have accepted it:)) is to carry this with me as I move on from here -- to keep the "edge" in how I live, even after I get past the crisis stage.