Sustainable Truths

I recently heard someone use a phrase that I'd first heard years ago in a course that I took through Landmark Education. The phrase, "Life is a Conversation,"  made a lot of sense to me at the time. The concept, that all of our sensorial perceptions and experiences are translated into words that we use to describe, evaluate and make sense of things, creating internal stories that we carry around as our experience of reality, was pretty flashy -- something glittering, easy to reach for.

When I heard it again though, I realized that I don't actually believe that anymore. Today I believe that a more accurate statement is that life appears to us as the conversations we're carrying around in our heads, but that isn't what life actually is. There's an important distinction between an insight, a momentary flash of understanding of a concept like life is a conversation, and a deeper, ongoing engagement, practice and contemplation of something, beyond the weekend workshop into daily living.

Thankfully over the years I've had the grace to have had teachers and teachings that have given me tools, like meditation, that have enabled me to practice being present in my body and the moment. The result has been a continual skin shedding -- peeling away layers of dead stuff to the raw new life beneath. I've also been blessed with various communities  for ongoing and intimate observation, feedback, and company on the path of self-inquiry.

So, what then, do I believe life is? I think it's an important question to ask from time to time. Exactly what the hell is going on here? Not that any of has the keys to the palace on that one, but it seems important to at least wonder, deeply. One thing I know for starters, is that life is not limited to my own or anyone else's personal experience of it. Another thing that seems true to me about life is that there is no such thing as "my" life. I exist within life, life is having me, expressing itself through me as a part of itself.

So the big question for me then is, if Life is generous enough to give me all this, then what am I offering back to Life? That's the one that life lets me consider, every day.




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