Pretense and disempowerment
After about a month of silence, you don’t only stop talking but you stop thinking in words. That’s a curious experience… because you stop codifying the world by thinking about it.
Alan Watts
I don’t do anything anymore that once made me Laura. I don’t dance. I don’t write. I don’t read sci fi novels. I rarely drink wine and listen to jazz. I don’t go for walks in the cool, dark night.
Who is this person walking around, calling herself Laura?
If Christianity gave me anything, it was the habit of looking at my own heart first. There is a teaching that the heart is deceitful and who can understand it (Jeremiah 17:9)? It’s often misused to teach people to mistrust themselves as sinful and to do what they’re told, despite their misgivings. Really, it should draw our attention to the cause of our restlessness and sorrow.
It’s not out there. It’s not whoever we blame for discouraging us or making us sad. It’s in the heart. It’s how we look at the world and how we frame events in our minds. It’s the story we tell ourselves (and others) about what happened and why.
The cause of my personal wilderness is the pretence that I’m disempowered. I’m telling myself a story that I don’t do these things because I have no time, because I don’t want to argue, because I’m tired or bereft of creativity.
It’s only a story and it’s a bullshit one at that. Nothing is stopping me from doing things I like to do as the Laura I like to be.
It’s time to recode my heart and tell the story a different way.
Muchness 