By Mark Nepo Let no one keep you from your journey, no rabbi or priest, no mother who wants you to dig for treasures she
Flat on my face. A healthy perspective.
If I am to be very honest with myself, I need to say that my pain doesn’t come from the rejection or ignorance of others. It comes from my measuring myself by that reaction.
It is the critic who counts. The inner critic.
The letter told me (as I am sure it told others too), that my experience did not match what they were looking for. Of course, I can’t contradict them, they know what they are looking for. It wasn’t the potential employers I was getting ready to stand up against. It was my dreaded inner critic.
The priviledge and the ordeal of the space between
I am intense and often emotions push me to react before I should. I knew it would be hard for me to allow for such a space, so I have been focusing on my ability to create it. And I made progress. I had been certain that the hardest thing for me to ever do is pause between stimulus and response. It never occured to me what a priviledge and ordeal it is to be in this space between.
Re-thinking – a superpower
As I progress towards the fifth decade of my life, I realize that changing my mind about things may not be my greatest flaw but in fact a superpower. Allowing myself the possibility to re-think, to reconsider, has given me a freedom that I didn’t even know I was seeking.
Divinty said hello to me on the Eurostar
I was no longer mad at the Eurostar for no wifi and no cell coverage. I understood immediately that we cannot find ourselves and each other truly in the distraction and the constant noise of our daily lives. That we can only go into that place inside us where we are able to connect deeply if everything else is quiet. No wonder the divine only found me in the Eurostar, deep underwater.
Children are an invitation
There is no need for a manual when raising children because the only way we need to respond to the invitation we are extended is by being … human. By allowing ourselves to be molded in this amazing and petrifying relationship that is parenting so that, at the end of the journey both children and parents are grown up.
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