Last night, during my meditation hour, out of nowhere, one past event came back to my streaming thinking. That was the event when I made up my mind to sign up for one learning course. Out of nowhere, all of the hope and fear before making that decision came back. In this crossroad of the course coming to an end, it didn’t serve me as I expected. As I “smartly” planned it to serve. I guess it was the feeling of any investor, at the end of the year, receiving less than their input. For me, it wasn’t just money I invested, but it was the time I tried to commit, other opportunities I ignored, the hope I held so dearly that it’d promise me a brighter future. Anything but this very now-ness.
Drilling into it, out of nowhere, I burst into tears, into screams. I choked with entangled emotions. I cried, sorry for my past self, sorry for all the things I hoped for and didn’t get now. I could feel the shame, embarrassment run all over my body. I started to see myself angry, started to blame the stupid, naive past self. Now I’m here paying for all the things I did. How unfair is it? I wasn’t that person any longer. I’m smarter and better. All of a sudden, I want so badly to abandon my past self, my very own self that I didn’t appreciate.
Slowly, I feel them conversing, “what if I’m just stupid. What is wrong with being stupid? Don’t you think it’s a crucial world that stupid people can’t survive?”
All my life, I’ve been raised to be good, avoiding bad. I was punished violently and harshly for making mistakes. Somehow, for survival, I managed to avoid mistakes, managed to advance in life.
In my adult life, I was so afraid that other people wouldn’t find me interesting, wouldn’t easily forgive me, and wouldn’t respect or love me. But how tragic, I can’t even forgive myself for any mistake. The problem is thinking of myself so highly. I never realized the problem of chasing highs, doing more, and ending up raising the bar so high that on my bad days, I can’t keep up with it anymore.
Almost everyone keeps praising me for being smart and ambitious. Holding onto that image, little do I know that it was a curse and I can’t live with the thought that I can be stupid sometimes, that I can make mistakes sometimes, that I can take wrong advice and do the wrong things. And the world will accept it no matter.
Now, with the power of the internet, almost anything I want to know or learn, I could. Anything I want to have, there’s a way. The question comes down to if I want it and if I put enough effort. So I keep blaming myself for not wanting the “right thing”, not trying harder, not taking the “right” advice, for falling into the scam. I beat myself up to make sure I did all I could. And how far that I could?
I’m vulnerable. I’m tired and I might need a quick escape sometimes. And what is wrong with that hope?
“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall.”
These are the kind and heartfelt words by Pema Chödrön through her book When Things Fall Apart. As I read those lines, I imagined myself as a stubborn, grumpy child holding hands with a calm and wise mother, saying “Yes, there are rooms, there must be rooms. And I want to safely play in them”.
That thought gives me permission to keep making mistakes, to continue doing my best without hope for any fruition. Give up once and for all, all the hopefulness. Just facing truthful life, the richness of today, this very moment.
I now, find the calmness to look back, just for the sake of looking back but not to making sense or story out of it (ego’s most favorite entertainment and escape). I can somehow, of course, draw a story, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Whatever I did should not hold me back from what I want to do today, now. That goes both ways, for the mistakes to stop me from pursuing certain things and for the success to push me in a direction that doesn’t necessarily serve me or is truthful to me, today, now.
It is, truly, only today matters.