Arriving At Now

For the past 20 years, I've read and re-read "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki as part of my meditation practice.

Today, the following sentence leaped out at me and made sense:

"We should appreciate what we are doing. There is no preparation for something else."

Suddenly, even as I sat there, the expectation of future experience stopped intervening in the actual experience, and I sat at peace for some time. I'm floating in and out of it now, in the face of what my unfolding life today brings, but I can access it when I stop and realize it again:

There is no preparation for something else. This is it.

_______

Since December, I've been in a dark place, struggling to re-version my experience of living, struggling to figure out "what I want to do when I grow up," even as I approach my 58th birthday in a few weeks.

With a good therapist, with a good life coach, with a journaling community, and with a lot of work, I've finally learned a few things:

- Let go of controlling emotions. Let them be, look at them with curiosity, and see what you can learn from them. You are not your emotions.

- A goal to achieve a thing is different from a goal to achieve an experience, a state of mind. The former are stepping stones to achieving the latter -- and, at the same time, results of achieving the latter.

- All there is, is this. The rest is residue of the experience.

I feel ready to re-version now. No. That's not right. I am already re-versioned. There is no preparation for something else. From now on, it's about experiencing and exploring and creating -- and trusting the process and myself.