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.

A Life on Loan

Yesterday I wrote about one part of the documentary "Happy" that stood out to me: that of reprogramming our brains in two weeks by meditating on love and compassion.  As I was practicing a meditation on love this evening, a different interview from the film kept coming back, over and again.  In a way, it brought focus to the transition I am in.

A middle-aged man in the film had been an eager young banker, determined to be the youngest director in his bank in Singapore when he was starting out.  I regret that I didn't catch where he is currently located, but it was clear it was a very undeveloped part of the world.  A friend of his, who volunteered at the "house for the dying," asked the upwardly mobile banker to volunteer there for a day.  He went and transformed in the experience.  He has never left.

He talked about the humble acts he performs to give aid and comfort to those who are in pain and dying--a drink of water, bites of food, aid in walking across the room to a man without a leg or a crutch, and even simply holding a hand.  At one point he almost choked up as he talked about the meaning this work brought to his life.

As he continued to talk, he shared what has become his philosophy of life.  "God loans us a life, and at the end of it, we need to give it back...with interest."  The interest, which is due, is what we give to the world in service.  Perhaps only a banker would come up with that metaphor, but it is easily relatable. Most of us have borrowed money for something in our lives--house, car, student loans.  We expect to repay the loans, and we expect to pay interest. However, I've never heard anyone talk in terms of their lives in exactly that way before.

In the nagging at my heart over the last two months, the hunger for meaning feels to me like God whispering to me that I need to be thinking about my interest payment. ("Seeking All Sides of a Challenge, 1/3/17.) I've always been in some kind of service job--making people's lives and work better, but most of the time it has been for middle-class people in relative comfort.

I've been volunteering to fund-raise for United Way, the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC,) and the Red Cross for most of my adult life, where I've talked about those in need. I've also served on several boards of directors of organizations serving people with a range of different kinds of needs, but never really got my hands dirty. Except for an occasional afternoon volunteering at the food bank, my service has been at arm's length. I've never really pushed myself out of my comfort zone to render service directly to people with whom I may be uncomfortable around.

In many of the Hallmark movies that are aimed at my demographic and always end happily, there is often volunteer work at a soup kitchen or tutoring kids.  In these times of personal giving, the potential romantic interest sees the compassionate side of the other person.  I hazard a guess that few people have seen the compassionate side of me, because I don't put it out there very often.  Part of me wonders if my heart might just break if I actually personally interacted with the recipients of my goodwill.

Somehow I don't think that when God asks me for my interest that it will be acceptable to say I talked about the needs but didn't get my hands or my business suit dirty will fill the bill.  During this time of transition, I need to hold the intention that wherever I land at the other end of my becoming, when the time arrives, I will pay my interest in full.

Trusting What I Know

At sometime or another, most of us have had a deep knowing about something--something we knew or something we should do--that was counter-rational.  Everything was telling us that logically what we know in our hearts is wrong, but in our guts, we know we are right.  Most times, if not all the time, days, weeks, or months later, what we knew is proven correct.

This weekend I had the occasion to talk with two people I haven't seen for a while, and each asked me about my work.  I told them about how I love my clients, and I do.  I told them how some of my projects are really interesting, and they are.  Then, I told them how I had to stay in my current employment for another year for financial reasons that are too complicated too attempt to explain here.

In my heart, I know I should go, but every bit of rationality tells me that I must wait a year.  So, I wait...in pain for time to pass that is like watching ice melt in winter.  In my heart, I know that I should leap, even if I don't know what I am leaping to.  In my heart, I know I am dying where I am.  What has me frozen in place?

After the dot.com bust, when I lost my business and everything with it, I yearned for a secure job, and that is what I have now. Finances were a major piece of that picture, but for me, just as important was the fact that I no longer felt I was making a contribution.  I had spent my whole career helping people in workplaces, and suddenly, I didn't have that opportunity.  Being of service in my work is a major motivator for me, and I had no one to serve.

Although as a young person, I had always wanted to be a teacher, when I started teaching university students how to be better future managers and leaders, I knew it wasn't a fit. Oh, it was probably more of a fit than teaching history or political science, which is what I thought I wanted to do when I first went to college, but I'd done work I loved and knew this just was exactly right for me. I'd spent my career working directly with managers and leaders with their current challenges.  I just never quite got as excited about teaching these same topics.  Yet, I was serving, and that motivated me.  Creating a different kind of class that students were excited about...that motivated me.

I've wrestled with this question for several months now:  why am I afraid to leap?  The quick and easy answer is always financial.  But, today, suddenly it occurred to me: what if I didn't find a way to serve? I believe that is more terrifying than being down to my last $300.  Now I will go to work tomorrow and each day, not for the financial benefit, but because I have the opportunity to work with a lot of fine people who let me serve them...and even appreciate my service. That is what keeps me where I am, and that I truly know in my heart.