There are some events in life that are so deeply shocking, that expose behaviour patterns so fundamentally and so nakedly that we have to drop everything to pay deep attention to them allow ourselves to change. It has been such a time.
I'm sitting in San Francisco, in the Angel Cafe. An Arabic language cooking show is on, the roof and walls are draped with hessian, there is a little water fall feature in the corner with plastic plants and there is a soup on the stove that seems to involve lots of green beans. There is something familiar, almost Brunswick about the place.
I feel like i'm in some waiting room, waiting to enter back onto the stage after some time in a sub plot off the main stage. Most of the other actors and audience are expecting the same character but i've rewritten my lines and don't know how it will go. More than rewritten my lines though, i've found the motivation and behaviour patterns need to be different to fit the new purpose behind the character.
My hope is that i won't be forced back to the old script, my hope is that i'm able to really able to fly with it, and that my new script will change other scripts also.
Change is such a strange thing. In exposing the beliefs i had to change, i was faced with the question of what do i replace them with? This haunted me for some time. In the end i went back to intention, what is my intention, what lay underneath the beliefs? It is this i have tried to change, trusting that my behaviour patterns will change to fit a new, clear intention. It is this that causes me some trepidation about what has actually changed. What if, in the challenges of my usual life, i go back to the old ways? And what does that mean. I cannot spend energy worrying about this, but it sits there, and i must acknowledge it.
Change is such a strange thing. I shall find out how strange soon enough.
Failure lurks like a troll under the bridge, and not just failure but totally screwing up. The mash up of amazingness and stress is the pressure cooker of find myself in, more interesting at least than just stress. A lot more interesting.
The house is quiet, black and white comic book film noir flickers through my head like a cinema scene from a slick film. Today was a skin of the teeth kind of day, making ends meet by doing way more than one day of work: in a focused flurry getting just enough words typed out to keep people happy, to keep afloat, to maintain the illusion that i'm not struggling with my demons everystep of the way, that i've not spent most of the week distractedly searching my soul and not being a well oiled cog. I wish i could focus like that everyday, but i guess if i did i might burn a hole right through the screen that my life plays out on; either that or get or so caught up in the flickering images i burn myself dry. I've done the later, and more than once. Now i fear it. I guess i don't have the faith i can do the former. Perhaps i don't want to. I guess i don't because i haven't, but then again i know i do. Or perhaps i believe that it will also burn me dry, that i'm afraid of my inner life being exposed as just so much tinder.
There are some events in life that are so deeply shocking, that expose behaviour patterns so fundamentally and so nakedly that we have to drop everything to pay deep attention to them allow ourselves to change. It has been such a time.
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