Tonight’s great epiphany:

I’m riding my bike home on a rainy night from my job as a video editor where I do work for Fortune 500 companies in San Francisco.

It was a beautiful thought for all the things it wasn’t: a rehash of the day, a worry about tomorrow, or really anything emotional at all. It was present & factual. The Buddha teaches, “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” At last, I had done it and the clarity it revealed was incredible.

I have a bad habit of granting too much attention to failed plans, dwelling over how I could have acted differently to change an outcome. It’s not surprising since my approach to most everything in life is essentially: gather data, analyze, and act. Yes, the scientific method. It works great for pretty much anything not involving people. So, it’s also no surprise that people are the source of most of my grief and I expend too much time trying to determine how to fix it/them/me. Part of what I realized tonight, though, is that it’s impossible to foresee how my own life plays out, let alone that of others.

That idea leads me to the huge flaw in my logic. My yesterday self is ignorant. Had someone in my past presented tonight’s epiphany to me as a true/false statement about my future self…five years ago, I might have tried to mark it half-true but ten years ago, I would have marked false without a second thought. I mean, I remember a yesterday self circa 1998 who swore to never leave her hometown. The vision of my future self was then, as it greatly is now, based solely on historical data, my present fears/insecurities, and the person I *thought* I wanted to become (which in all honesty, was the person I thought my parents/teachers wanted me to become).

And yet, though time & time again, yesterday self has proven herself to make terrible decisions about what is/isn’t possible, I continue to feel some disappointment when life doesn’t turn out as she planned. Of course, it’s not black & white and I can’t become fickle about everything in life, blindly disregarding every choice I’ve ever made, rationalizing it as, “Well, yesterday self was an idiot and I know better now.” Because, I don’t know better. The sad reality is I never will. Each present is a past in the making. And since keeping commitments is one of my cardinal rules as a person, the best I can do is worry less when the circumstances out of my control don’t go as planned. A door closed is a window opened. The lack of fulfillment of one goal alters my present and changes everything so in the big picture, it doesn’t matter much. It’s a difficult mindset to get to and try to stay in, but it sounds like a good resolution for 2011.

So tonight, I’m going to be thankful for all things that my past self never imagined my future self to be.

Presently yours,
Mindy

PS Tonight’s inspiration to reconnect with my blog has made it much more likely that I will document the happenings of Oct - mid-Dec sometime before the year is out.

For my blog moment of zen, I present my first Christmas card of the season from Kali. It’s embarrassingly relevant.