The swing of life's beat?
One, two, three, four, when we walk to the beat, we fall into our natural rhythm, we follow in time and can forget we are even moving, we can slip into a daydream or even a pleasant awareness of the world around us. When we stop fighting the natural oscillations of our energy, wants and desire, when we do what we want or need to do at the time that they naturally occur and feel easy, we are in alignment with the universe. However it is too easy to loss the beat, we stop listening and start taking things personal, get lost in drama, we seek order in the face of chaos.
When you stop trying to organise everything, and go with the flow, things still get done and it is surprising how often it is that when you realise something need to be done is exactly the moment that you should do them, otherwise why did you mind so conveniently remind you of it at that moment. By struggling against the mind, telling it to tell you later, you are making the mind busy and it will react by being busy, it is very literal after all, and it loves nothing more than reminding you of things that you told it to deal with later. When you have a busy mind, it becomes even harder to hear the beat of life, you are changing channels from the news to a diary of what you have not done, so it is hard to stay in time.
That is the fight, the struggle to be present, the point of expectations, regrets are to make the moment you are currently living better not worse, and they even have their own beat, the good news is that you have control over that beat if you take the responsibility of leading your own orchestra. No matter what you do someone in percussion is going to hit that drum sooner or later, then you can either response with grace, easy and joy so that you can take elegant and skilful actions or you can have a trauma and throw your sheet music up in the air. Which is what an awful lot of people do when their minds starts thinking about the future and past, they forget the music that they were playing in the moment and pay all their attention to the rude drumming. They can be mesmerized by it, feed into it, they will play the game of worst regrets of my life and how many expectations have I failed in my life.
And if you do not have failed expectations you have not been dreaming big enough, you do not get to be an artist, writer, astronaut, fireman, farmer, ballerina, lighthouse keeper, all in one lifetime. That does not mean you do not get to play with idea of being those things, you get to imagine anything you like, you get to live it for a few minutes and then decide to return to reality. Imagination is how great things get done, as long as you realise that words, thoughts without action mean nothing at all, it is how journeys and adventures proceed not how they end or begin, we get to turn them into deeds and achievements. The secret is not to get lost in them, you take the beat and use it to move on.
Regrets can destroy the rhythm entirely, they are the silence into which music disappears and whilst silence serves it's purpose too. There must be silence for music to exist, every piece of music contains more silence than sound, every out of tune note, badly placed flute and mistimed chord. Regrets can be useful and point us towards our areas to improve and work on, they can teach us lessons and inspire us to action, when used positively they becomes reflections, ways of looking at us selves with compassion and kindness, and they can give us the determination and discipline to improve. Every great sporting team has had it's mistakes and regret, what makes them great is not that they ignore them or make them into a sport of how they are unlucky or doomed to under perform rather they use defeat as motivation to do better, to improve and learn, as the drive that pushes them forward to greater heights. Regret are a place you never want to return to, know this and you will do everything not to go there again, and if you have no other direction in life, at least know that it is not the way you want to go.
For every negative there is a positive if you take on the responsibility to find them, by changing your point of view of being a person who things happen to and instead becoming the one who things happen for, that story is available for anyone who chooses it and one which is worth living. There are a million excuses and reasons for failure in life, and everyone is valid, true and you could describe any special circumstance for yourself that gets you off the hook and would make you feel better, but do they? If they made you feel better I would say find your reason and embrace it, but they don't, no one enjoys feeling powerless, it never has and never will be a good feeling. If you have the choice of the two stories, even if objectively one is true, why would you choose it to be true, why not act as if you had everything under your control and then make that story as true as possible.
Instead find your point of power, accept whatever limitations you have and then move past them, that is power, because now you have control, you have the chance to improve, get better and move into rhythm with the beat of your life, and how you wish to move forwards. If you need to sleep, rest and self-care for twenty three hours of the day, use your good hour to do something that moves you towards your life goal or make
your life better. When you accept that you only have that hour, you will not waste it on regret for the waste of the rest of the day or spend it wishing for more time, that is not the stoic way, instead you will use that hour in the best possible way you can, use it for yourself, embrace it and maximise it.
You do so by first acceptance and then awareness of what is possible in that hours or limit space, and that is where imagination comes in, what is the best possible version of me and how much close can I get to that version today, now and that is only limited by what you consider plausible. When you are listening to the drum of regret what is plausible is limited by those thoughts, if you have no control, nothing is plausible apart from more of the same, when you take responsibility for your life, everything is in your control because you have taken responsibility for everything, even when they are not.
Which leads us to the most important thing of all, action, it is the only game in town, the only thing that matters, without it everything else is meaningless chatter. How we act matters, it change the opinions of others and ourselves, it is what we believe in, who we are, brought into the physical world, it only when we have an effect that we have meaning and purpose. To take the pressure off, the good news is that you only
have to turn up and be present, and you are ahead of the game. However that does mean actually being present, no baggage, regrets, expectations, just being in the moment, aware of the energy of yourself and others, listening not talking, seeing not projecting, witnessing the feeling you are having not being lost in how you feel about anything other than the present moment.
When you are present like that, you can not help but be alive to the beat of life, how all energy flows, rises and passes, is ever changing and contains a depth that expands with the amount of awareness that you bring to it. By listening to that beat, you get to follow it, response to it, stand by it and trust it, you rest when you have low energy , and work when you are focused and empowered by high energy, everything gets done without a plan and without the struggle, you just follow the beat and life become the dance that it should be.
