Hang on!?

I've been in such a nice place over the last few days that I've been tempted to fall into a chair with arms and legs spread open, relax, and maybe even laugh out loud.  This feels so good.  I'm having fun with class. I'm delighted with my exploration and experimenting with new healthy recipes.  I've been getting exercise.  I'm clicking one or two items off my "things-to-do" list every day. I'm not even stressing about money.

Technology challenges have dominated that list, mainly because dealing with them is usually so stress-inducing that I put them off until I can't do so any longer. Yesterday I spent two hours on a technical support call with the nicest man.  I felt like I was in good hands. During long gaps while software was uploading, we talked about a lot of things.  We laughed.  At the end, I thanked him for taking such good care of me; he said I'd made his day.

Alas the problem wasn't solved. Today, at his suggestion, I headed to the Apple Genius Bar to continue working on it. While I was there, another technician worked on a problem I was having with my new iPhone. I felt really supported by the two technicians dealing with the separate problems.  I even laughed with one of them. Not once did I feel stressed.

That was the pinch-myself moment to make sure that efforts to induce more dreams hadn't resulted in daydreams.  No, I was awake.  This was all real.

I felt so good that I mused about maybe I'd learned whatever spiritual lessons I needed to learn in this life, and I could just enjoy the rest of my life just like I've been doing the last few days.

I remembered times in the past when I'd been in similar periods of my life.  There were different spiritual lessons: not easy but I felt like I was going with the flow of the lessons, instead of struggling. The last 17 years have been a struggle, or more accurately, I've felt like I was in a river of struggles, attempting to keep my head above water.

I recall a time decades ago when I'd been drifting down the wild and scenic Rogue River in Oregon with a friend. We were at a very wide and calm spot, where we were both splayed across the raft, drinking in the sun, hats down over our faces.  Suddenly, my friend let out with an expletive, followed by "Hang on!!" Our relaxed reverie was abruptly interrupted as we went crashing over a waterfall, dropping us several feet into a pool of whitewater where we struggled and fought to move out of the whirlpool.

Each time I've been in one of these "good spots," I have would be thrust into a pool of spiritual lessons for months or even years. Each time the lessons presented to me were more challenging than the previous cycle and developed different parts of me. I have dramatically evolved spiritually during this sequence of periods of challenge.  In each, like struggling to get out of the whirlpool at the bottom of the waterfall, one day I would realize I'd finally made it out.

I'd love to think that the last--the longest by far--would be the last, but for those of us with the intention to evolve our souls, I think there must always be lessons.  In The Game Called Life I say that in our lives we have three things to accomplish:

• Be of service
• Develop our gifts and talents
• Learn the spiritual lessons our soul chose.

Quite frankly, if it is OK with the Universe, I'd really like to scratch the last off my list or at the very least allow the spiritual lesson be to learn to enjoy these wondrous moments. That's a lesson I could really get into. I would also consider spending the rest of my life working on the first two, but even as I say that I know that even doing that will bring lessons.  

For today, I am enjoying being in a good place, and I'd really like to do that for a bit longer--maybe even years.  And, if another waterfall/whirlpool awaits, I'll worry about that when it gets here.