Yesterday I experienced a break in an old pattern.
I’m not even sure even how it happened really.
But the result was a beautiful, felt sense, of peace.
Although for some people this period of lockdown has provided an opportunity to slow down, it also appears that the frenetic activity and continual busyness with which we conduct our lives on the ‘outside’ has simply been replaced with frenetic activity on the ‘inside’. We can fill our days with Zoom yoga, online choirs and virtual dinner parties, or watch hours of entertainment broadcast from celebrity homes.
There is a suggestion, an insistence almost, that we use this time in isolation ‘constructively’, that we don’t ‘waste’ the opportunity to learn a new skill or complete a new project or make some worthwhile contribution. Whether it is Mari Kondo-ing our cupboards, chucking out junk from the garage, or producing some masterpiece, we have to have achieved something in order to make this period count.
I am no different. I often crave an empty diary in order to have time to relax and undertake creative pursuits at a leisurely pace. But in practice this never happens. There is always a long list of things that I am having to continually ‘work’ on, various projects and interests that are always in the background, projects which can never be finished because they include ongoing learning and practice.
None of them are urgent, yet I carry them out with a driven quality not commensurate with the task, with a sense of urgency that allows no let up and which robs me of the enjoyment of doing things for the sheer joy of it.
Yesterday I simply realised that all I needed to do was choose, in moments of free time, what I wanted to spend my time on at that time. If anything.
And this revelation has had the most remarkable effect on me.
It has taken away all constraints, all time pressures, all intended outcomes. Every burden that I put on myself has been lifted, all expectations have disappeared. I can simply do whatever I enjoy, for its own sake! I don’t have to market my book, I don’ t have to spend hours learning how to use complicated software, I don’t have to get better at anything and I don’t have to achieve anything!
With this extreme clarity came the most beautiful space of nothingness, of peace and calm that I rarely experience normally.
I found myself doing everything slowly, with awareness, paying attention to the smallest detail with a child-like curiosity. Needing nothing. Revelling in the delights of each moment.
And within that space came an excitement, a recognition of what it feels like to simply play and be spontaneous, an inkling of a different way of being in the world.
Intellectually, with hindsight, I might say that what I experienced was perhaps a return to our unconditioned state, where our natural self-expression is unhampered by concepts and beliefs and ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’.
Whatever it was, however fleeting, the meaning of ‘A Space to Be’ seems to be taking on yet another dimension. It’s as if, rather than needing the space that I am always craving, to fill with something, it’s the space itself that I have been craving.