Climb every mountain

This has been a very long gap, partly due to a sudden burst of work and also an equally sudden bout of flu. The latter came on while I was delivering workshops but was not sufficient to put me out of action. Yet afterwards I felt exhausted for several days and not very capable of further action. So I’ve focused on the immediate tasks in hand and everything else got squeezed out, including blogging.

What at first was an enormous tiredness was replaced by a calm, steady focused time which has been very productive. I remember a naturopath telling me once that things like colds were actually a clearing out, although we usually see them as negative experiences. That’s how it has felt this time.

However, while I was recovering, I remember thinking “I just can’t this”, whatever it was I was thinking I ought to be doing. It was like my system was rebelling against whatever another part of me was putting on myself. Such was the sense of exhaustion that I was filled with an overwhelming sense of my own incapacity. All I could do was to surrender to it, and didn’t go much further than idle and mindless musings on the internet, a kind of window shopping.

When I got back into blogging mode, I re-read what I had just typed before the bug hit. And it struck me forcefully what I had written, in the context of what then happened. Here it is, unedited and marked by inverted commas:

“Last night I went with my wife to see Lloyd Weber’s revival of “A Sound of Music” at the London Paladium. The intellectual purists may blanche in horror, but I really enjoyed myself. Yes! Why not! Having some old-fashioned fun, “good clean innocent” romance, going down memory lane. It looked pretty dated now in terms of the views and values expressed, yet I noticed how people who would probably never have known the original were there in their droves. It had an almost eternal quality that reached across the generations.

One song really struck me differently, which reminds me why it is often good to see old plays and films as well as the new. At a crucial point in the romantic drama, the heroine has run away back to the convent because she has fallen in love with her boss and is debating with the Mother Superior of the convent, who is refusing to readmit her, about whether she’ll find what she really wants. The Mother Superior sings a song I’ve heard many times. It goes something like this, “Climb every mountain, forge every stream, follow every rainbow, until you find your dream”.

It really hit me. So often people have said to me things like, “but I don’t know what I really want to do.” Watching the musical last night, it occurred to me “but we have to go and look – and keep looking”. And we do not cease to seek. What is not serving us is to leave the question of our destiny unanswered. Each of us in our own way has a contract with destiny. We chose it, I believe, before we incarnated. We may not consciously “know” it in being able to articulate it. But each day we go out there and we make meaning of our world, each of us in our own way.

It seems to me that there’s a life force within that impels us forth. Despair, depression, cynicism, disbelief, all are reluctance to engage with life and with destiny, for whatever reason. As Neale Donald Walsch writes, our purpose is to create ourselves anew as the next grandest version of whosoever we are. It’s out there and it is within. We seek new meaning for ourselves.

Many times I have felt despair about continuing with my efforts to pursue my destiny. “What’s the point.” Why bother? Why keep trying? Why not become a couch potato? And then, some little voice inside says “Come on. You’re not going to give up. Just get on with it”. Living, I mean. Engaging with life. Putting one step in front of the other. Carrying on with whatever next needs to be done. Then, the mood shifts, the negative feelings drop away – or, as I’ve explained earlier in this blog, I drop them. They are after all a creation of my ego. As the Zen saying goes, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water”. It is a shift of awareness.

Keep looking. What you want is there. It’s been there all along. You already have all the answers you need inside you. You’ve just not noticed it yet”.

So there you go, just let go and it all becomes clear! It’s been there all along.