So I haven't blogged in over a month. Well, at least not on here. I've been blogging a lot in my head. "Oh, that would be a good blog post." "I should totally write about this in my blog." But then I don't. I've been busy, I guess, with wrapping up a job, moving, starting a new job, etc. But I'm not really intending to make excuses here. There's always enough time to do the things you really need to do.
I promised myself months ago that I wasn't going to let this blog become another nagging item on my to-do list. While remaining cognizant of my original intention/plan of blogging once a week, I was going to accept the reality that it might not always happen, and would be okay. The purpose of this blog is to help me find authenticity in my life. Boy, has it helped me over these past 6 1/2 months. But part of authenticity is accepting when things are serving us, and letting go when they are not, without judgement.
This is just a constant reality of life. We can make plans. We can set our intentions. But then we have to detach ourselves from the expectation that things are going to happen as we have planned, as we intend. We want so badly to be able to control our lives, to build our realities like little Lego structures, each block neatly stacked on top of the one we placed below it, in the order we want, in the pattern we want, in the time frame we want.
But life does not work out like that. Somebody comes and steals your yellow blocks. It turns out that the blue ones we have are from a different, discontinued line of Legos, and don't actually interlock with any of the other blocks. The little Lego people don't cooperate either. They don't want to be in the places we put them. They move things around. They break things. We had our Lego world all planned out, train tracks and bridges and castles. And it doesn't look anything like we wanted it to.
Okay, so full disclosure, I never really played with Legos. But I like the idea of them in this analogy--a world where we can control everything, a little world of plastic pieces that interlock neatly together and don't move. The actual world is big and alive, full of energy and motion. And when we get upset that our carefully crafted plans shift rapidly from the original intention in the context of this world, we are ignoring the nature of the world, which is simply not meant--or able--to be controlled by one person. Even that person's own life, within the world, cannot be controlled by that person. The world is too powerful a factor, and it is not made of little plastic pieces.
Many times, when things don't play out exactly as we planned, we consider them to be failures. In a sense, when we think this way, we are setting ourselves up to fail, and then judging ourselves harshly for it. To better align ourselves with reality, we have to be receptive to the idea of success in many different configurations.
I have a recently-crafted plan for myself, for my life. I have a dream. I have steps in mind, I have a time frame in mind, I have goals in mind. But as I continue to vision and prepare, I stay mindful of my constant companion, reality, whose intentions and whims may render my plans in a very different configuration as they unfold.
It's hard for me to say this, because there's this nagging reaction inside me that somehow, this weakens my dream, or implies that what I want more than anything in the world might not happen. But what I continually remind myself of is that life, even when it winds up going differently than I planned, always winds up working out even better than I planned.
