I have been awake since 4 am. But no writing got done. My morning has been interrupted. It is hard for me not to feel upset by this but I also know that this is life. Life is not smooth sailing all the time. In fact, life is more a series of endless interruptions that lead us to the next moment that we didn’t anticipate.
I have a tendency to be annoyed at things that disrupt my flow, my agenda, my routine. I will fully admit that I allow these slight detours to often times unmoor me and assist me in a downward spiral. I allow this because I am way too married to the trajectory I set. The routine I established. The plans I made. Life doesn’t really care. Life has its own plans and for the most part, life comes in interruptions great and small, poignant and banal. Life is really just an endless stream of interruptions that vex us, derail us, stymie us or thwart us. Well, that is at least how it feels to me.
As I sat interrupted this morning, I felt all my usual feelings of irritation and annoyance at being prevented from moving my day forward in the usual manner. I sat with all of that and found my blood pressure increasing. My ability to hold myself in the present moment challenging and hard. I need the routine, I need the stability. I NEED it.
But life does not really care what I need. It isn’t concerned about me and my plans and designs. Life has a much bigger job to do and cannot be concerned all that much about me and my needs. Even when it is my own life that I am speaking of...because my life doesn't exist in a vacuum. My life intersects with many other lives and agendas and designs.
So I sat here feeling somewhat trapped and discounted. Desperately trying to scramble back to the safety of my monotony. It was anxiety provoking.
Then I had a thought: what if I just accepted that what was currently occurring is what is supposed to happen? What if I my insistence that “life” be a certain way was what was actually making me anxious? What if I could be looser about the routine and plans and needs? What might occur then?
So I did my best (which probably didn’t look all that great) to relax into the moment and to view these “interruptions” as life unfolding in the present. There was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. I was here, life was happening and I didn’t need to be somewhere else doing something else. I could just be here with all these annoying fucking interruptions and I could just remain with them, instead of trying to change them.
I was marginally successful. It still irritated me. But I could also acknowledge in the moment that there was a time where I would have lost my shit. I would have been so derailed that I would have had a meltdown. Today I didn’t. I didn’t lose it. I didn’t do further damage to those around me. I just did my best to accept what was then occurring as being exactly what was to be occurring in the moment. It helped.
Life is unfolding for us all every moment of every day. We have ideas about that. We have thoughts and feelings about what moment should come next, what it should feel like, what the result should be. And it almost never goes the way we think and feel it should.
This morning I felt this way. This morning I realized that by labeling life as an interruption, I was distancing myself from all that was going on around me, in short, I was missing life because I insisted upon seeing what was going on only as an interruption to the life that I should be having, instead of seeing it as being exactly the way life was supposed to be in that moment.
What I am left with this morning is a feeling that when I see life as endless interruptions, there is no flow. There is no cadence or rhythm to my life. It feels jerky and hard starting. However, if I allow life to just come to me one moment after another with no agenda, no script I can meet everyone in that fresh place of understanding that it isn’t all going to go my way...but it will always go forward. If I can set aside my demands and needs for reality to be other than it is...perhaps I can enjoy life’s flow more. I can be a part of it in ways that I have not been before. And perhaps that is a better use of my time than just sitting in the dark being irritated that I am not adhering to schedule.
Perhaps interruptions are here to show us that our way is not the only way. That our agendas are always lacking because they come from the finite and marry us to that instead of allowing for a more expansive view of the infinite. Today, I wasn’t completely able to jump into life’s doglegged departure from my usual morning with a lot of joy, but I was able to not just get all pissy about it either. And for today, that will be progress enough. Life jigged and I didn’t jag. I didn’t jig either but I moved somewhere more towards allowing life to unfold without the need to constantly and forever control it all. And that feels like progress...interrupted though it may be.
