Life and I

Life has a lovely way of intruding. Here I am happily cruising along, metaphorically sitting and listening to birdsong and watching the sun go down in the azure sky, when life has to intrude. It knocks on your door and when you refuse to open, it breaks the door down and barges in anyway. It's 'lesson time' it seems to say. Time to pull up your socks and tighten that loose belt of yours, it says with a wry smile on its face. So here I am rudely waken up from my somnolence and wading waist deep in lessons, some of which I hope to imbibe one of these days, once I get a quiet moment from crises that is.

"But what's the point?" I say, "of all these lessons, after all I'm gonna die one day, right? And the lessons to be buried with me, unless I write a ruddy book of lessons (hehehe). "

"But that's the whole point" my soul butts in. "I am here to learn lessons and will not be swayed by a fickle mind."

"Ok, ok, but why get bloodied and bruised in the process? I still carry some old battle wounds and they still hurt in the night sometimes."

"That's because you are so darned stubborn and won't learn from the lessons that life throws at you."

"Well, I guess life should just leave me alone then and let me gaze at the stars like I want to"

"But that is where I want to be too, among the stars, if only you would not get so embroiled in the dramas of life. If you wouldn't take each event in life and turn it into a major production, but instead remain detached and look at it from my point of view, then you could be flying all the time. But you have to get stuck into each event and take it so personally and get a mighty inflated ego if it's a 'success' and a badly bruised one if it's a 'failure' and keep swinging from one to the other in a great attempt to keep yourself in the forefront and keep me seperated from the real business of learning lessons."

"But why can't I learn from other people's dramas? Why does it all have to happen to me?"

"Well, you could and you would if you were quiet enough to observe what's going on beneath the surface. Besides, they are here to learn their own lessons, so they attract into their lives dramas that teach them the lessons they wish to learn. Isn't that amazing?"

"Not really, I don't think my father-in-law would agree, lying in hospital with a IV tube into his arm and a tube into his peeing apparatus, both of which he keeps pulling out"

"I guess that's also the reason why he is living so long and his soul's still with his body. If only people would stop resisting what is and stop insisting that life proceed the way they want it to, and wait quietly for their soul to speak to them, they would know what the real purpose of the experience is and then they would then experience infinite peace."

"So, what the lesson that you have come to learn?"

"Connection with the Divine, connection with the Self, connection with Love, which is all the same thing actually."

"...and what is preventing you from learning that?"

"You! With your incessant chatter, your judgements, your insistence of living in the past or the future. Your 'what-ifs' and 'if-onlys', your insatiable desire to be in control all the time. Your inability to accept things as they are and insistence to change them to fit your limited world-view, all these interfere with my connection with divine wisdom, with stillness and my experience of love which is quite different from worldly love."

"Hmmm… you're right, maybe I should be quiet." (Goes into mute mode, at least for now :)

(plagiarised from various sources, notable among them being 'The Power Of Now' by Eckhart Tolle)