I was feeling detached. 2007’s holiday season had ended. Strange feelings of disorientation wash over me. Curious feelings of connection to a higher power flicker just out of the range of my radar, flickering and indistinct. One second there is something there; the next minute there is nothing. The ambiguity of my sense impressions, maddening.
One minute I feel like I am wasting time. Hours pass, the waves of emotion relentlessly crashing against the rocks of my sanity. The sand that I stand upon erodes beneath my feet as each new wave crashes into my world.
The next minute I become aware of some type of progress, as deep levels of my consciousness shift and move. New experiences and information being integrated into all that I am. At this point I feel like I am NOT wasting time. There is purpose. There is intent. There is structure, and therefore, reason.
I feel at a loss, to realize that I cannot control how fast I can collect and sift through all the data that is my world. I become excruciatingly aware that each second of the process is one more second of the time that I have on this earth to live, seemingly, lost.
I have great fear, that the time I spend in contemplation may be time wasted. Yet I am also aware that without some sense of understanding, the whole of my passage through this plane of existence becomes meaningless and therefore irrelevant.
I examine where it is that my time is spent.
It’s as if there is a constant power struggle going on between my spirit and the will of my body. Some of the time it feels as though my spirit is a prisoner to this body. It seems as if my spirit and my body are at odds with each other in competition for my attention. My spirit has it’s own agenda. It wants to explore, collect new information and experiences, soak up life like a sponge and then evaluate it, savor it. Contemplate it. My body on the other hand, demands that I do certain things to maintain it. Its’ demands are constant and time consuming. They often really annoy me.
First it wants to eat, and then it wants physical maintenance, cleaning, oiling, trimming, moisturizing, then styling and accessorizing. Then it wants to sleep. Demand demand demand. Sometimes I feel like looking this body straight in the eye and screaming at it, what about MY needs? If all that I am truly IS spirit, and this body is just the car that I drive to carry me around, the “spacesuit” that I must live in, in order to exist in this dimension, then I personally find it extremely inconvenient that I must spend so much time trying to do what is necessary to maintain this body. Often times it feels like my entire life is nothing more than a series of routines, which ultimately lead back to fulfilling my body’s constant demands. I am aware of this because of the experience I have had when I DON”T pay attention to maintaining this body and the subsequent pain and suffering that occurs from that negligence. I have learned from that experience who is really in charge here. So, sometimes it appears to me that I am nothing but a slave to the endless requirements of maintaining this body. Sometimes it’s just a damn pain in the ass.
I realize also, though, that it is my privilege to have this experience, in this plane of existence, here on this planet. That regardless of the fact that my body isn’t as expressive as I wish that it were, isn’t as tough as I wish that it was, isn’t as pleasing as I would like,
that it doesn’t matter. It is all that I have. I suppose there wouldn’t have been the internal arguments between my spirit and the will of my body if I were not already acutely aware of the fact my body is only temporary, a bit of knowledge that my body will forever be jealous of my spirit over. So the solution appears to be that we are going to have to compromise. I must balance the desires of my spirit and the will of my body. I will love it, despite its shortcomings, and interpret its demands for what they really are, an expression of a desire to be accepted and loved and paid attention to.
Because after all…these are the demands of all the bodies out there.
