“I need to be someone special, going somewhere. But I’m not.”Classic makings for anxiety/fomo, no?
Post that on facebook and, if you’re lucky, a hundred friends will reply in support “yes you are special; you’ve got this!”
Those friends are great to have.
Because it’s stupid to hear from someone else that you’re nobody going nowhere, even though that seems, to me, to be a much clearer reflection of what’s true.
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Lately I’ve been re-living a painful experience I had many times I had as a kid.
I would be standing there, talking to someone when … this meta-awareness would come over me. It was not liberating-feeling, though; it was like a fog, or a virus, something that infected my brain and then all of a sudden I was so painfully aware of everything happening, I couldn’t think clearly anymore.
I remember that feeling, the impending sensation of the awareness shifting, as a kid — from probably 8 until, though less and less as I got older, well into my late 20s — and thinking “oh jeez, here it comes again.”
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That whatever-you-call-it has been resurfacing again. I’ve been getting to know it.
The fog and stress I felt as a child, and what I have experienced many times lately, feel like a byproduct — not a necessary one but one that happened all the same — to the tune of the belief I opened this post with: “I need to be someone special, going somewhere. But I’m not. Instead I’m just [whatever I’m doing].”
But this time, for whatever host of reasons, something else has been emerging as part of the conversation.
It says something like, “What if this is it?”
And, in that moment of reckoning, the anxiety falls away, completely, and a deep peace is all that's left.
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"What if this is it?" did not come as a new-age-Socratic demand or instruction. It's a real question. (That's a crucial but often overlooked aspect, I think. It's not question-as-strategy-to-avoid.)
What if … THIS … this right now, like right now right now … is it? Like finished. End of story. This is it, pack up your bags, goodnight that’s really all the reality / god / awareness / whatever you’re ever going to experience.
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It’s not what I thought it would be.
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(Y tu? I am all ears.)