Listen. No, really. Close your eyes, turn off your brain for a few minutes and listen. I’ll wait.
OK. Did you hear anything? A bird? A truck going by? A lawnmower buzzing down the street? Try again. At a certain point you will hear a voice. And you will hear it with your heart because the voice comes from deep within you.
Some call it the Holy Spirit, some call it the Universe, others call it their Spirit Guide. Whatever you call it, whatever works for you, it is an inner voice, an instinct, a truth that is yours alone. But you won’t hear it unless you stop long enough to listen.
I was in the Methow Valley a couple of weeks ago, staying at a friend’s house. The house was set atop a dry, grassy hill and most of the 360-degree view looked at no less than five miles of gently-folded green fields leading up to distant snowy mountain peaks. My husband and I spent hours sitting in lounge chairs. Silent. Looking. Thinking. After just one day, I was bursting with ideas that stemmed from a place I vaguely remembered but had somehow lost touch with along the way.
When we are surrounded by noise, hectic schedules, technology, work, pressure to fit in and keep up and be and do everything that is expected of us, it prevents us from listening. Worse, it forces us off the path to our true nature, which is joy. We believe, or hope, that when our kids are grown or when we finally start making more money or get that remodel finished everything will be okay and our troubles will cease. Our late life years will be as golden as the autumn hills of the valley.
The latest of hard-learned life lessons is that this isn’t true. We merely trade one set of challenges for another. It’s a balancing act, a coping game that, I am beginning to realize, will never end. The ordeals of our 20’s give way to our early parenting years and the struggle of building businesses and careers. Later come aging parents, struggling adult children, unexpected financial troubles, debilitating accidents or injuries, job losses or layoffs. And the hits just keep on comin’.
Wait! Don’t give up here. All is not lost! Indulge me in just a few more paragraphs.
Each stage, each challenge, each obstacle to happiness prepares us for the inevitable next one. It’s lifelong schooling. We have no choice in that. But we do have a choice as to how we respond to the trials and whether or not to accept the lessons they can teach us. To fine-tune our listening skills and try to understand where we are being led. My husband has always said, “Education is expensive, no matter how you get it.”
I’ve had some pretty expensive lessons this past year. My husband’s near-fatal accident gave me a new appreciation for all the things about him that used to annoy the living daylights out of me. We are grateful and hoping for continued recovery and looking forward to many years together.
When some co-workers’ attacked my character and position, destroying a 25-year career, I was blindsided and outraged. I spent the next five months trying to figure out what happened and why, meeting with lawyers, trying to work out the details of the mess that ensued and muddled my work and my life. None of it made sense to me. None of it was fair. The “justice department” was definitely out to lunch.
I had to hit bottom, scrape the floor, curl up in a fetal position, before I remembered to listen. One of my daughters said, “Mom, time to stop fighting and get on with your life.” My other daughter told me a story about a lesson she learned in daycare when she was six years old. One day, walking down the hall, a teacher told her and a friend that they couldn’t do something they wanted to do. “That’s not fair!” complained my daughter’s friend. Just then the door to the utility room, which had been slightly ajar, swung open and out stepped the craggy-faced maintenance man. He stopped them and said, “Let me tell ya somethin’ kid. LIFE isn’t fair.” And he went back into his workroom and closed the door. Sarah never forgot where she first heard those words that most of us find cliché.
Perhaps it’s a cliché that needs to be revisited and considered from time to time. Because it’s true. It hurts when it happens to you and you realize just how true it is. But, if life were always fair, we wouldn’t learn. We wouldn’t develop empathy. We would be living in Pleasantville and just skimming the surface of our bland existence. We wouldn’t even know we were happy because there would be no counterbalance.
I realized that I had to take the reins back and start living the life I want to live. I had to listen. And realize that all the doors that had been slamming in my face were clear messages, but messages that I was misreading. I thought I should fight. I thought I should win. So I kept beating my head against the closed doors, seeing the blood that was trickling down my forehead, and then continuing to bash on the doors over and over again.
If I were truly listening, I would have realized that I was being guided to stop. To stop fighting something when the fight itself was hurting me, depleting me. To leave that nastiness behind and focus on goodness, on beauty. Not that fighting injustice is wrong. But to what point, what end?
The Japanese aesthetic concept of Wabi-sabi teaches that there is beauty in imperfection, impermanence, incompleteness. There is beauty in modesty and humility. There is beauty in unconventionality.
The more I learn to listen – and to hear and trust that inner voice – the more I realize that this is true. Life isn’t fair. Nothing is perfect. The good guys don’t always win. But that depends on how you define winning, fairness and perfection.
IRENE HOPKINS can be contacted at hopkinsirene23@gmail.com.