Yesterday was a long day...of me beating my head against a wall.
That is not completely true, it just felt that way.
I am working hard to bring about change to people who do not really want to change. Like most everyone, they just want to complain about the way things are, but when you provide them avenues for actual change, they suddenly become like dogs crossing the threshold at the vet...
And I get it.
I feel that way too, a great deal of the time.
But I have learned, in the hardest of ways, that change is gonna come whether I like it or not. And if I fight the change, it just makes it worse. Like the dogs at the vet, it isn’t like putting on the breaks actually works, it just makes the whole event more difficult for all involved...the dog still has to go to the vet.
And so all beings apparently, dogs included, resist change. And I am no different. I too resist having to change and accommodate and move things around and work with others who want me to do things differently than I want them to do them, know how to do them, or think they should be done.
So frustration is the place where change and resistance clash like two elephant seals on a beach in high mating season. Each fighting for the right to propagate, change, make their stand. And when I see change and the resulting resistance to it come about, I am reminded that we are all just trying to survive and to steal a little peace, and some love and comfort. To not live on the bleeding edge of existence every Goddamn day.
When I step back from the abyss of my own frustration which borders on despair frequently, I can see that all of us are in the same boat. Just trying to eek out an existence that doesn’t bore us, doesn’t overly challenge us into extinction, that allows for fairly large measures of love, success, pleasure and to avoid as much pain as possible for as long as possible...I can see that frustration with living is the only possible result. For me. For you. For them. For those bloodied elephant seals.
And so I am called once more to the higher plane of my own existence...to seek guidance from the Divine that doesn’t reside in temples, or others (although it can certainly be found there) but within my own body, my own heart, my own spirit. All I have ever needed to know could be accessed best from within myself. This is not to say that I know it all, but I do believe that I have access to it within myself and that this seems to always be the last place I look...
Frustration can be the harbinger of growth...a calling if you will to go beyond that which is frustrating and infuriating to seek what lies beneath. And for me, it is the resistance to change while also demanding that change must take place for me, for you and for all others, all the time. When I surrender enough to the struggle to actually SEE the struggle, the struggle ends, and with it so too goes frustration and its bestie, despair. I am arrived at some other place, some midpoint between change and refusal to change...and my life slowly rounds another bend allowing me to see vistas that I would never see if I was not willing, and able to make changes within myself and allow the attendant frustration to teach me all it can.
Again. Still.
