Letting go of ideals

We live in a land of ideals where comfort equates to good and discomfort is immediately coined bad. Anything that challenges our homeostasis is quickly type cast as bad, the way it felt getting our name on the board in school growing up in the eighties. If only life was as simple as this habit we have formed of categorizing it as so. Maybe life would be easier if we could use our ideals to make it so….less sick, less prickly, less disappointing and we may not need to live as if there are monsters lurking around every corner. And yet, life is full of tragedies we can’t prevent, we can’t anticipate, we can’t control. But it’s also full of immeasurable good and wonder and joy that comes in the same unpredictable way. There will always be pain, discomfort. There will always be hardship, challenges, killers of joy, unavoidable heartbreak. Those things will tear us apart, break us open, make our souls bleed and our hearts wail. But that is not the end. It never is. Life goes on. Always. Love prevails. Joy finds its way back in through the smallest of cracks and with it she brings lessons from pain and paints us a new piece to show us just how to take that pain and incorporate it into the masterpiece.

Sometimes when it seems that things have gone so wrong, just around the corner there is this new opportunity, a possibility for change. But when we are so fixated on the pain being bad and we avoid it, repel it, categorize it, and alienate the discomfort that painful parts of life inevitably bring, we can’t see the path that leads us out. Instead all we see is the scary stuff like a bad ending, we are keenly aware of all that can be stolen from us, and we get scared, so afraid to lose. So often, we run for the hills. We avoid at all costs, at the cost of losing good things that we hold dear in the name of fears that might not even be real. Ideals trick us, trap us into believing that the ultimate prize is to achieve comfort and maintain it at all costs. And so we become addicted to comfort, mostly unknowingly. Those ideals are sneaky and clever, they are. They trick us into changing our phone numbers instead of changing our lives. They tell us to hurt other people and use our best intentions of hopes and plans for the future as our justification. Ideals entice us to trade ourselves for our best opinions, and worse yet, those ideals tell us to trade ourselves for other peoples ideals. In each of these trades what is lost is people, humanity, connection, good love.

What if we were wrong more. Maybe less would be wrong, bad if we just got more comfortable with the parts we think are wrong. Maybe what’s wrong could be just right. What if we embraced being wrong, messing up, making mistakes and letting the chips fall as they may. What if instead of spewing shame we accepted the wrongs, said them out loud and then let the people that love us most hold us, love us anyway. I wonder how that would open us up to experience pain and discomfort, to share and connect in those moments and see that it is not an ending, but truly a beginning if only we use it that way. What if we trusted that there is a plan that is so much bigger than us that just smirks at us thinking that we are so in control with our over planning, over strategizing, over engineering things of the soul, of the divine. What if we truly trusted that plan to catch us, to steer us, lead us, provide for us. Perhaps there is more wonder, more magic to be felt, to be seen, to experience if we would only stop working so hard to kill the pain, to maintain our ideals and we would stop and rest and let go instead. Let go so the bigger picture could take over, and bring all that unexpected good that also shows up when we least expect it that we can only dream of because we work so hard against it all too often planning and scheming and idealizing. Perhaps this is what we are missing by being so convinced that we know what is good and what is bad, what is joy and what is pain. They are all wrapped up in each other, you know. They don’t separate themselves. It’s us that does that.

So as life comes this week, this month, this year and maybe forever, what if we tried to loosen our grip on our ideals and instead look a little more for the good in the bad and the bad in the good and use every situation, experience, every messy, beautiful, magical whole of our lives to live less in what it should be, less in the ideal, and more in the here, the now, the real. This is the place where we meet people as they are and think less of what they could be. This is where love comes in, good love. We are all flawed and we know that. I think we can stop avoiding the fact of that matter. Let’s understand that horrible happens, it’s in us, with us, but there is always another side. Let’s work to let go of ideals and let in the mess, it’s where the magic is anyway.