dailydatewithgod

As a recovering perfectionist, I have often struggled with letting go of things being a way that seems just right to me. Learning to adopt being okay with what is adequate may sound like slacking for some people. I never would have completed my graduate work while working two jobs if I hadn’t listened to my mentor who told me that getting the assignments done was adequate.  I was sure I would end up submitting subpar work.  No such luck, I aced all my coursework.  It turns out “A” stands for adequate. The more I learn to ebb and flow with life the more I find the ideas in my mind about what is adequate differ from what is adequate to my heart. My mind can circle over and over minute ideas of what perfection looks like in a particular situation yet my heart is not involved in this conversation. Our hearts find messiness and imperfection the adequate conditions to open us up to what it means to be relatable.  While our mind is busy looking for perfection our hearts are knocking at us to open our eyes and find the beauty in the adequate circumstances that have brought us to where we are at this moment. When our minds are worrying about whether we are perfect enough to meet the approval of another person, they find our adequate behavior to be charming and something that opens up the conversation between us.  While our minds may balk at the idea of adequacy, our hearts invite us to pause and notice what happens when we see how grateful we can be for all that is adequate in ourselves and our lives.

We often forget about our retention capacity.  We become so intertwined and wedded to an idea or a way of being that we cannot separate ourselves from.  We retain powerful and harmful habits.  Our mind’s capacity for memory and function of looking for like information through which to filter whatever is happening at the moment can set us up for disaster if we are not aware of it.   Nothing is inherently wrong about memory or how it works.  It is in fact, marvelous.  If we did not have the capacity to remember and then filter the information we have retained from those memories about how the world works we would be like the main character in the movie Memento. There is nothing either good or bad about how we function as human beings.  It is about reconciling what is happening in our hearts with what is happening in our minds.  What areas of retention in our lives are residing in our hearts or our minds?  What elements of retention within our minds hurt our hearts and vice versa?  The whole of who we are is an amazing being and the degree of our retention especially of things we retain without even being fully present when we learn them is mind-boggling.  God encourages us to notice with curiosity where our powers of retention are serving us.  When we use the curiosity muscle of our minds coupled with the courage muscle of our hearts we empower ourselves to use our capability of retention to benefit the whole of who we are and the lives of those with whom we interact.

Perhaps the reason that kitten videos on YouTube are so alluring is that we see in them a liveliness that speaks to our hearts.  We connect to what we are watching from an internal place.  Being alive is what we are.  Although sometimes it seems as though we are the walking dead.  I know we joke about the Zombie Apocalypse but have you been on a commuter train before?  As kids living on Long Island, we got to take the subway and train for special occasions on a visit to Manhattan.  I remember my father remarking how amused he was that the regular commuters were not the least bit phased by how my sister and I would laugh and swing around the standing poles and point at the graffiti.  We were just being frisky kids. The reason children are more in touch with their aliveness is that their heads are not so full of reasons not to be.  One could say being frisky is a luxury of age, but is it?  Or have we just convinced ourselves of that because we do not know how to reconcile that we have lost touch with the frisky that lives in our hearts?  Perhaps we have cast the term frisky into the realm of something sexual because as adults it is one of the few enjoyable things that we allow to get our heart rates up.  Nothing wrong with that albeit limiting.  God invites us to notice what awakens the frisky in all areas of our lives. Why place frisky in the category of either childish or sex-play only?  God invites us to spend some time tuning into the energy of our hearts and notice what it means to experience the frisky in the places outside what our mind can conceive.

Sometimes we go along with something just because it is all we know. We don’t question it because it works and we have no reason to or because we think it would be too hard to change.  The deeper question becomes do we conform to something or someone out of convenience or because it is representative of something to which we are aligned? I don’t think it is merely an either-or proposition but God invites us to look at the areas of our lives in which we claim fidelity.  If it were not popular would we still be aligned with it?  If it were not comfortable would we seek to change it?  If it were not convenient would we even participate?  As we mature we realize that we can no longer hold on to all the allegiances of our youth.  Some of them have simply fallen away as is their nature.  Others are coated over with dust but we still have them the attic of our minds.  More so than actual things or people, God invites us to notice what ideas guiding our beliefs express themselves in action because of our fidelity to them?  When we have clarity around the ideas to which we are faithful we know what is driving our way of being.  When we find ourselves thinking and doing in a way that does not seem true to our own hearts, it may be time to evaluate our fidelity.  I think somewhere along the way, perhaps with all the graduations and steps in life, we think we are supposed to reach some sort of summit, and then we will be done.  As one of my mentors always says, you’ll know when you are done because you are dead.  As long as there is life flowing through our veins.  As long as we have the capacity to take in a new breath there is a choice to be made of how we wish to express the being we are.  Do we want to embody a fidelity that resonates with all of who are now or someone who we once were?

As human beings, you could say we are a story kind of being.  We create connections and meanings through our stories.  Where there are blanks and unknowns we make up stories.  The basis of most cultural and religious systems are stories.  The story of who we are and where we come from.  As these stories are repeated generation after generation they become what is known. We forget that they stemmed from our internal pull to know why, to fill in the blanks, and to find a sense of safety by creating certainty in our minds.  Then we reach moments when those who are new to the story begin to question it.  Children do it all day long at a young age when they ask “why?” about everything.  Within each of us is this nagging question and so much of what we are interacting with daily is the stories we create in our minds.  We stop asking out loud why and fill the blanks ourselves. Before we know it we are certain why someone said or did something even though we have not been inside their head.  It gets easier and easier over time to just go along with our answers than to investigate via conversation and connection.  When we learn to connect with our hearts we experience a space where the fear does not reside next to the unknown.  From that place, we can move into curiosity and investigation.  We find ourselves desiring to know from that other person’s perspective what is going on. When we endeavor to investigate we are using the energy of the heart to work in conjunction with our minds and demonstrate a willingness to learn.  We are here to be connected and learn from one another.  It is how we grow in love.

On my daily dates with God, I get an opportunity to observe the way that my mind operates.  It is fascinating and frightening all at the same time. There is so much going on and yet nothing at all.  The thoughts that I can either latch onto or not are merely visitors.  It is only when I grab hold of them, give them a place to stay, and forget to let go do they wear out their welcome. We cannot stop our thinking at least not entirely but we can remember that our thoughts are visitors and we get to determine their length of stay.  For me, that means making a regular practice of inviting them into conversation with my heart.  When there is an exchange of presence between my heart and mind I am better able to assess the best length of stay for the visitor.  When neither my heart nor my mind can come into an agreement, it is helpful to take a breath, initiate my spirit, and invite God into the conversation.  How do you see this?  Is this where my attention is best served?  Is this truly a visitor or are is it meant to take up residence?  The level of curiosity we can develop about where our mind is going and who it is being led by enables us to respond to the life happening within and outside of ourselves.

I’m not sure exactly where the idea comes from wanting to travel a smooth path, but it does not seem to be based in reality. The life I have known thus far is full of bumps and snags.  There is no such thing as a well worn smooth path unless I am blindly following a road that so many others have traveled.  Those are valuable roads but we are here to set the course on our own adventure.  This means we will experience snags.  The beauty of it is when we fall in that hole, get yanked back by that branch, come across that obstacle, we discover who we are.  In some cases, we find the path we are meant to travel through the snags.  We seem to think that being alive is about getting it right, having approval from others, and being a success.  What if being alive means we can navigate through and around the snags?  What if being alive means we have learned how to use the courage muscle weaved in our hearts to find the true vibrancy of life within ourselves?  God invites us to view the snags as the path instead of the impediments they appear to be and use them to create our lives.

Sometimes all we need is a little boost.  Just enough to wake us up or help us get moving.  We may think it would take something epic or cataclysmic to break the tension but then it happens when someone cracks a joke.  We are certain we have no more energy to take one more step and then we take a deep breath. We are convinced that it is only important that we have all the right words in our speech and appear cool and confident. Then we find out how much people related when they found out we were human when we stepped over our own words for a moment.  It is the missed stitch in the beautiful Persian rug that was put their intentionally.  It is the hole in our favorite t-shirt that we just can’t throw away because it is soo comfy at the end of a rough day. These are the gleams of our lives.  We miss them often because we are looking to be blinded.  Yet how valuable is a gleam of light in a dark room?  How immobilized would we become if we were blinded?  It is the gleams in life that give us hope.  It is the gleam of love that awakes in our hearts when we see the smile on the sick kid who just found his favorite stuffed animal to hold during chemo treatment.  Those gleams are the beats that keep the heart going.  God encourages us to learn what the light of life gleams connect straight to our heart.  The more we are familiar with them the more we share a gleam with others by being present to them which allows us to embody the gleam of life for someone else.

People may be speaking the same language but their vernacular has an impact on the translation.  Of course, there is the accepted understanding of vernacular that is cultural, geographic, or familial.  God encourages us to get to know the vernacular of our language with ourselves.  Aside from specific words, there is a vernacular to our physical, emotional, mental, energetic, and spiritual elements which make up the whole of who we are.  If we do not know the vernacular of each of these systems how can we begin to understand how we can operate more fully.  The reality is sometimes one or more of these elements have a louder voice and demand more of our attention.  Yet all are always present.  By knowing the vernacular of our mind we can help it to understand the vernacular of our heart.  If we take the time to embody the vernacular of our heart we can utilize it to communicate with our body and mind. The vernacular of our wholeness is the language of what it means for each of us to be fully alive.  Our vernacular may be similar to others but no one else is the whole of who we are.  An intimate relationship with the vernacular of myself is what God makes room for on our daily dates.  It grows and evolves as all language does.  Over time as we learn to open the communication lines through understanding the vernacular of all of what makes us ourselves, the better capability exists for us to engage with others who have a different vernacular than us.

One thing I have figured out is how full my mind is of stories telling me what I can and cannot do.  If I spend too much unchecked time in there it becomes as they say in the recovery rooms, a bad neighborhood.  Now I understand that my brain is geared for survival and developed to detect anything that may threaten that survival.  But I am not necessarily cognizant of that when I am listening to the bad news predictions going on between my ears.  The power of mindfulness from my perspective is not that it creates some ideal state of calm and zen but that it allows me some separation from thinking that all my thoughts are true and observing them as just happening.  The observation increases the feasibility of anything in my life.  Yes, of course, there are limitations.  But left to my mind’s default story, it is not worth the energy to discover what about my actions or ideas are feasible.  Maybe I cannot become a famous ballerina, but it is feasible for me to become a better dancer the more I dance.  I may not (insert grand desired goal for my life) but it is feasible for me to take the path of progression towards my desire.  It is even feasible that I will encounter surprises, learn something about myself and others, and grow in love because I am living.  When we learn to pause and not take as truth what our mind tells us is feasible and therefore worth it, we may even encounter a willingness to head in the direction of something that is not feasible for us but worth a try to find out what is feasible for us.