Santiago de Compostela 2009
Bursting out of one's comfort zone does not take much. It can be as small as going to another part of the city I have not driven to before, or going out on a limb to make new friends, or learning about subcultures like cage-fighting or suburban living in Indianapolis. Getting extruded out of one's routines does not take much but feels like such a big deal. Maybe this is because of the sluggish, slovenly pace my life took when I decided to take a sabbatical from my active professional life. A year and a half of waking up to a day I can design as I wish inured me to listlessness instead of focus and joy. I needed to challenge my rote life.
No matter that taking initiative is often what change takes, aiming for a goal seems to me not the shaping power in change. The major changes in my life came either as corollary to what I have undertaken or, even more often, irrelevant to where I have set my goal on the horizon of possibilities. Ultimately this is my basis for hope: that what proves significant comes out of the blue, from beyond the corner of what I see. The possibilities I see are not as great as those beyond my ken, beyond me.
Years ago an Indian moksha yogi explained to me how he saw the dynamics of mystical states. The adhika, the striver, must indeed take the first step and work his way as close as possible to the goal but all he can attain at the most is to bring himself to the cliff edge. Something else, something alien to him, must pluck him from the edge and carry him like a cloud to the other side. Again and again we bring ourselves cliffside. Many times then nothing happens. The edge begins to lose its sharpness and still nothing. Then out of the craven blue it comes and suddenly we're nowhere familiar and predictable. We've leapt without leaving the ground but our feet stand somewhere new, our eyes look with new colors and clarity, we zoom past ourselves into change.
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