return to form (and the mysterious stranger)

31 December 2007 - 17:52

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>

One of the strangest experiences I know is to stare at someone who knows *you* while not being able to place *them.* As if you were just waking up from a horrible accident and you don't know your family anymore...

It happened to me three days ago. I was enjoying food and drinks with Kale and my wonderful friend Susan at the Maiden in the Mist, and a gorgeous girl approached our table. She looked at me as if she had known me for a very long time, but I couldn't for the life of me place her.

It turns out she did know me. Apparently, she has been reading *this* since the beginning, even the entries that no longer exist here. Six years of cryptic rambling about my life, and there we were: strangers yet not. She is the first person who has ever approached me knowing me only from these words.

Needless to say, I was delighted.

I have spent a great deal of time in the last month musing on the past and imagining the future. Since my life seems to change completely with the seasons, it is safe to say that my future self is a stranger to me as much as the girl I met at the Maiden.

And yet...four years ago in college I realized half consciously that the thing that would prevent me from being great at either of the only two occupations I could ever imagine for myself (therapist or writer) was not lack of education but lack of experience, lack of mistakes, suffering, stories.

I am no longer handicapped by my lack of experience. Therefore, if I were to meet the girl I will be four years from now, she might seem much less strange than the girl I am now would appear to a former self.

2008 (and 2009) will be a Return to Form for me.

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The concept of equanimity [i.e., acceptance] is often confused with withdrawal, indifference, or hesitation, but this is a misunderstanding. Such states of disconnection are actually very subtle forms of aversion or hostility toward our experience. By contrast, equanimity is a state of complete openness. We're fully connected to what's going on, yet free of the exhausting, ceaseless grasping on to pleasure and pushing away of pain.

Equanimity born of wise attention dawns when we recognize the naturalness of change. We recognize that there will inevitably be pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. If we resist this fact of life or take it personally, we react in the same old ways -- with grasping, hatred, fear and delusion. When we understand that the vicissitudes of existence are natural, simply the way things are, we can open the mind, relax, and be balanced.

Sharon Salzburg
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