Intention

It is like radio static. Sometimes you cannot hear the song at all. Sometimes you can, mostly. And sometimes you think you are hearing it just fine but, if you fiddle with the knob (yes, in my thirty-odd-year-old mind, radios still have knobs), suddenly the signal comes with such fidelity that you are amazed you thought it was clear before.

Good morning.

There is something, some sense... I have referred to it as a path, as love, as many equally misleading names. I believe it is what Socrates referred to as his "sign," and what Philip Pullman characterized as a daemon in the His Dark Materials trilogy. I will not tell you it is my soul, my calling... though these (and other names) are things I have called it in the past. All I know is, there is something that seems to produce that sense of fidelity in my life.

It is why I do whatever I do. It is the silence that draws me and, sometimes, the noise that distracts me. My opinions of the past are colored by my mindfulness: "x was a good choice, because it was involving this sense; y was a bad choice, because it was not." The present moment will become the colored past soon enough, and mistakes are not anathema.

While in Texas recently, I began reading The Way of Practical Attainment. It returned to me that sense of fidelity. I saw clearly the stories I had been telling myself, and I also saw that "I see clearly the stories" is also a story. I understand that my idea of progress is not seeing past the stories, but rather to follow this sense like Ariadne's string as the stories continue. (Such stories, being insubstantial, cannot be obstacles unless I, in my mind, give them substance.)

I heard a quote recently, which said something like, "There are days when I do not want to practice my yoga. I do it anyway, and I never regret having done it afterward." I have no regrets, but those things which are most like regrets are the actions I took in lieu of practicing this nameless sense.

It is to practice this sense that I have made some radical decisions. I do not regret the times that I have embraced it, and I have regretted the times when I let it go. Straying from this, in fact, invalidates all decisions I previously believed were made in, literally, "good faith."

I am not afraid to make mistakes (including, perhaps, the mistake of being afraid) and I am also not afraid of dropping the string. It is this sense above all that I want in life, and I know I will always return to this, and I know that enduring what I do not want with this is preferable to enduring what I do want without it.