You are a serious person, but your seriousness is attached to what you do, not to what goes on outside you. You dwell upon yourself too much. And that produces a terrible fatigue.
- Carlos Castenada
The entire month of March this year found me in quite a personal struggle. For some reason I found myself falling back into old habits and giving in to my fears, completely succumbing to that which I thought I had beat and forgetting to listen to my heart. I swear it must be some lunar event that had it's hold on me, or some Bad Mojo, because on the second day of April something clicked and I started to see things again the way they really are instead of the way that I'd come to see them in the months leading up to March. I feel like myself again. I feel like a veil has been lifted from my eyes, and I can again see life for what it is, and enjoy what is around me instead of dwelling on the past or future.
For a whole month I felt like some sort of slave to an unseen will that was bouncing me around at the end of a string, and now that string has been cut.
Maybe it's less a cosmic force, however, and more the way that my mind works. I have this incredibly strong need to understand everything put in front of me. To dissect it, analyze it, take it all apart and spread the pieces out on the floor and then put it all back together again so I can feel that I've mastered its most intricate workings. When someone dumps something big, complicated, and intricate on my desk, I tend to forget everything else around me until I've come to completely and throughly understand what it is I'm working with. I'm simply not programmed to easily accept something without fully understanding everything about it.
Or maybe it's the things I care most about that I feel a need to understand.
But part of life is reprogramming yourself from time to time. Sometimes we do it to better ourselves, sometimes we end up making ourselves less than we want to be, and other times we just keep things status quo because we're comfortable or otherwise don't feel the need to dig up the information that might be required for reprogramming.
What I've come to understand in this bout of reprogramming (which I made far more painful than it needed to be) is that some big, complicated, and intricate things don't need to be understood. I don't need to know why a boat floats to travel on one, I don't need to know why an airplane doesn't fall out of the sky to fly on one.
In fact, some things really aren't as big, complicated, or intricate as they might seem. Sure, a modern airplane has engines, computers, electrical cabling, and all sorts of other things going on, but what keeps it in the air is the same basic principle that keeps a paper airplane afloat.
I have come to learn that only by placing your faith entirely in what you know in your gut, trusting your intuition completely - as scary as that might seem - only then will you be able to see whether or not you've been bending to the will of fear. Because only by doing what fear tells you to do can you give fear any power.
So to my friends and family, I want to say that I am sorry for the past month. I am not perfect (who is?) and by slipping back into bad habits, and giving in to my fears, I have recently been a source of conflict - unnecessarily. I am sorry for causing any conflict I may have caused (or extended), but I have no regrets, because life is about learning, and sometimes you have to learn the hard way. Some people have to be thown into the deep end in order to learn how to swim, because they would never leave the safety of the shallow end otherwise. I'm not usually that type of person, but sometimes I get caught up on things that don't matter and forget to take off the swimmies and venture out of safe waters, into the unknown, where there are always great adventures and exciting times.