An Existential Ache
Once upon a time I assumed my meditation practice was where universal wisdom would find me. I had to drop that idea. Having goals with meditation is a quick way to get frustrated. Sitting just to sit, to be with, to observe, to breathe, that’s all there is*. This was a pain in the ass for me to embrace. I spent many sits negotiating my way through my morning practice. “I, am letting go. I, care not for the outcome. I, have noooooo expectations…” and then I would set my timer for 10 minutes and wait for something to happen. Enlightenment never found me in this austere practice, and even now sitting because I love it, it’s not my avenue for the universes fairy dust. This seemingly random tidbit comes full circle - keep going.
As rain clouds loomed for the second day in a row, dog-mom guilt found me on a early morning walk in lieu of my usual morning sit. Pacific northwest spring looks like taking advantage of the glorious moments of sun. I took in the smells on the cool morning air, slightly sweet as the buds awaken, surprising me with life where the dried branches resembled certain death. I was feeling into the possibilities, my senses alive with the promise of new beginnings. Particularly a house my partner and I were getting ready to go see. As I imagined the space as ours, mentally decorating and visualizing our people over for Sunday family dinners, I began to walk a tightrope. It was a house we had looked at last year and is way out of our budget, but we decided to look at it, again, because I am full of possibility in the morning dew of spring. We had said that if the house was still on the market next year, we’d revisit. It’s still there.
Perhaps you’re starting to sense the tightrope. Possibility and reality can crash together, leaving the casualty of a damaged human’s dreams and the bravery and courage it takes to dare to dream shattered in its wake. Enter the moment you’ve been waiting for: the fairy dust that moved through me and escorted me down from this precarious position. It didn’t matter. If we got the house or didn’t, it didn’t matter. I knew this deep in my bones.
There’s a scene in Schitts Creek where Alexis is taking David to his drivers test, which he’s freaking out about, and she tells him to relax because ‘nobody cares.’ Shocked, David tells Alexis ‘people care’, and she repeats - nobody cares. When David is on the road with the examiner, he notices the examiner is not paying attention, and a smirk of relief and recognition settles into his face, he has a visible full body exhale. Those moments of embodied knowing, they have the power to change everything.
The night before I had this unnameable pit, this dark void that only seems to find me in the late hours. This feeling was asking me to hold it, to be with it, to cry it’s truth into existence. The feeling called itself my existential ache. It’s not for understanding, but inherent to being human. So, in the late hours of the scorpio full moon (appropriate scorpio feels) I held my existential ache, and the next morning during the seemingly mundane act of walking the dog, I remembered. That existential ache was an invitation to remember something important.
The outcomes aren’t the goal. What matters is how I choose to act. How I choose to engage in the world knowing this. That my transitory humanness is akin to a game. What will I choose to play with? What have I learned in this earthly coliseum about the choices I want to make?
My choices matter. It’s not about right or wrong, good or bad, getting the house or not getting it. What if I loosened my grip on the ‘what’ and turned towards the ‘how’?
This is where the meditation part comes in. It offers a moment of pause, of spaciousness. Rather than act from the impulse of emotion or the onslaught of thoughts, a breath or two to feel into my souls compass, to ask myself ‘what choice do I want to make?’ With some space, I can notice the voices in my head vs the pull in my heart. The trigger of emotion vs the stillness at my core. I can calibrate to my souls compass. And if I don’t - if I make a choice without attuning, that’s totally fucking fine. No self-berating, no judgement, just acceptance of my choice.
Sometimes we get these windows of enlightenment. When the moment fades, we’re left with a dull memory. That’s when I hope I’ll remember what matters. That I have choices, that we have choices, and those choices are the moments that make up our lives, that tend to the existential ache.
p.s. I can’t prove this, but the part of me that exists to drive our human evolution forward tells me THIS is how we change everything. Soul choices vs. reactive choices. This is how the outcomes become our re-evolution.
*a great mantra from “Whereever you go, there you are”, by Jon Kabat Zinn