epipsyche.org

I really dislike it when you’re talking about something your baby is doing and somebody says “oh yeah, well just wait till they start doing X.” I know this phrase is meant to put things into a perspective: that X is going to be way worse than whatever bad thing is going on now. But it doesn’t really help. Mostly because whatever is going on now, is going on now.
The companion to “just wait till X” is “at least she’s not Y.” Still not very helpful because Y either hasn’t happened yet, or has already happened, or may never happen. In any case, Y it not the current situation either.
All of this is sort of a negative way of staying in the moment. The state of mind being “the only thing that matters is that Z is happening right now at it sucks.” Z may very well suck. And X and Y may suck even more when and if they happen. But X, Y and Z are what there is to work with.
And therein lies the real work. Because to push beyond the boundary of “this sucks” and get to “this is” is incredibly difficult. And then to keep the perspective that X,Y, and Z are just variables is a constant battle of letting go. Letting go of comfortable, expectation, negativity, self. It never gets any easier. The variables just change.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 10:45 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.