The energy of life is never static. It changes – just like the weather. And sometimes the changes are extreme like what we all experienced last week when our temperatures swung from 50 below to 50 above zero, all within 5 days.
Our emotions and feelings can also undergo these extremes. Sometimes we are flying high emotionally, and sometimes we are deeply in the dark. Despite our opinion of “how we are doing”, this dynamic flow of life energy is always flowing.
I talked to a young woman this week who explained to me that she just wanted to feel like “full sun” all the time. She didn’t want the cloudy days. The predictability of full sun felt like something to reach for.
Yet because life energy is always changing, pulsing, and flowing we can pretty much guarantee that not every day will be full sun. If we had the certainty, security, and sureness of full sun, we somehow believe our life might be better. The same way we believe if we found the right job, right partner, right place to live, or right something or other, we would be happier.
If we can learn to relax into the natural flow of life, including the below zero days and rain storms, we tend to do better. Most of us weren’t taught as children how to move with the ebb and flow of our feelings, our health, the weather, or the events of the world. So, we struggle with the fact that things are always changing!
I explained to my young friend that I would rather aim for an authentic life than a sun shine guaranteed life. To me an authentic life is embracing the highs and lows, the light and dark, the masculine and feminine, the messy and the clean, the so called good and bad. It seems to me it is in the tension of opposites where real life begins.
I so appreciate the poet John O’ Donohue’s description of how to move toward this authenticity. He says, “When you meet someone who is not afraid of themselves it is a lovely experience. They might be a mass of contradictions but at least they have patience with their own otherness.”
May we all have patience with our otherness, the extremes in our lives, and the fact that our lives keep flowing forward.
