Moving Mountains: Day 10
Most of the time I find it a challenge to keep myself on track. On track with my work, on track with my goals, on track with my development. In the moments where I feel on track, it is when I recognize that I have the freedom to go off track. It is strange, because realizing that I can be elsewhere doing other things allows me to more easily stick with what it is that I am doing. On the other hand, when I am feeling off track, it is usually because I feel stuck on the track that I am on and do not recognize the freedom that I have to pursue other tracks. This is how I feel it has been lately, a mental oscillation between one track and another, between feeling stuck and recognizing that I am free.
This morning is one of those mornings where I feel stuck. I have to leave to pick some friends up from the airport in a little while, and today I have to watch a dog that I have gotten to know well but who has so many different behavioral issues that our sessions often turn into training rather than walking. What I would really like to do though is go and climb a mountain. I would like to be out in the open feeling the elements on my body and seeing the world from 4,000 feet. Perhaps I just want some perspective. It is a perspective that I associate with the mountains, with rolling hills and grassy fields. It is the perspective of openness, opportunity, and insignificance.
Every day is a chance for me to recognize that in the grand scheme of things my little life is at the same time incredibly significant and insignificant. If I look at my life through my own eyes, it seems like a very significant ordeal. I have family and friends who love me and I love, a job that I work, a school that I attend, and am a part of a society made up of millions of other people just like me whose contributions allow it to function. In this sense, although I may sometimes feel like a cog in a machine, if that cog is lost the machine will not entirely stop functioning, but it will certainly cause it to function a little less effectively given that other cogs must now do more work, and still others will find it harder to turn because of pain and grief. This is a truth that is evident in everyone’s life. On the other hand though, we are just one human being on a planet that does not require human beings to be on it in the first place, so cosmologically we have a place but for no apparent reason.
The question for me remains though how to combine the idea that we are societally and individually significant with the idea that we are cosmologically insignificant? More importantly, how do I use these ideas in my own life to truly embrace the freedom of being able to move through life unobstructed by single track thinking? Perhaps the way to do this is to remember that I get to determine my own significance, and therefore I should strive to act in a way that is in accordance with the significance I have determined for myself. Right now that means going on a walk, brushing my teeth, and adhering to my goals. They might seem like baby steps, but they feel huge. Perspective will do that.
Day 10.
