Connection as a way of living

Saturday, February 17, 2018

7:05 a.m. I started work trying to carry on from yesterday’s beginnings [on another book], and other than some editorial changes to yesterday’s page, I have mostly crossings-out. Then I remembered, it’s a matter of being in connection. So I thought, I’d better check in.

Spinning your wheels isn’t a necessary part of the process. Sometimes, connectors don’t arrive when needed. When that happens, do as you do with these conversations: Start again somewhere else. Not far away, just slightly elsewhere. It’ll restore traction, and as you well know by now, bridging is an easier task than producing what is to be bridged.

Okay. Can we talk about life otherwise than in the context of the book?

It’s always up to you. The questions are there, but you cannot always let yourself hear the answers.

No. I clutch emotionally somehow.

So – just intend to not clutch. It is truly that simple, though it seems not. It is a matter of disconnecting from result. If you allow it in, that does not automatically mean you must carry it out or share with another.

Yes, but I don’t think that sharing is the problem. It is that something within me can’t bear to know. At least, that’s what it feels like.

So, in that case, patient reassurance, centering not on the crippling question but on what it is that feels threatened by the question, and things will loosen up. You will learn something else, the change in you will mean the same question is now something different – because you will be different – and matters can proceed. Try. You’ll see.

All right, I’ll try. What is this sense of emptiness when I’m not connected? I see that I wrote out the question in a different way from how I have been thinking of it, and so answered it.

You didn’t exactly answer it, but you moved to an attitude that allows the answer to come into view. When you are connected, you don’t have a sense of futility and ennui. That is in itself progress, or rather the result of progress. Remaining in connection – in conscious connection, naturally we mean – is your new default condition. This is good. Think back to your college days for a vivid example of how life felt when your 3D ego was trying to live on its own. Those are two poles – connection and isolation.

But you have not lived in isolation for many a year. Instead, you have lived half-awake.

Just as [psychic]Maya Perez said, so long ago.

There is no describing the difference between waking and sleep to a sleeper, or even to one half-awake. But now you know.

When you are half awake, you are half-aware of your connection. At first this connection may manifest as discontent or even as restless irritability. You can feel that you aren’t living right, but you don’t know what “right” would mean or what it would feel like or how to get there. Now it’s more like – “I shouldn’t be doing this, this is wasting valuable time,” but it is no less a puzzle as to how to stop wasting time.

That’s about it.

Live it. Live in faith hope and charity, exercising prudence justice temperance and fortitude as occasion requires. That’s really all you need to do.

Not obvious how that will overcome feelings of futility.

No? Faith is exactly that. You can’t prove that life is worthwhile, not that your life is being lived correctly for you. But you can live in faith that it is, and you can hope (when faith wavers) that it will come out all right, and, knowing your own intentions, can live in charity toward yourself, and therefore toward the life you lead. In judging your life as you go along – for of course you can’t help measuring, although you can help condemning – you can be prudent (not expecting the impossible nor attempting the impossible), and just, seeing things straight, and temperate, avoiding destructive extremes, and brave, refusing to despair. Is there any way this cannot help?

I just re-read this to see if I can send it out, and I think I can, which I am glad of, as it surely will help others besides me.

That’s our intent, no less than yours, of course.

Really it is as simple as being resolved to carry on in the teeth of contrary evidence, isn’t it.

Yes, provided you remember the difference between resolution and pig-headed-ness. That was Winston Churchill’s problem, you see. The quality that saved the West in 1940 caused him immeasurable grief through his own idea of resolution in incidents like Edward [the abdication crisis of 1936], Gandhi [the independence movement in India in the 1930s], revaluing the Pound [while Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s], etc.

Glad to see you so well-versed in history.

We have a good library to consult, and of course you and we know we’re both smiling, but your readers may not.

Many thanks for this. It does help.