Brightsiding...

I'd wanted to write something about Spring, today being Eostre, the Vernal Equinox.

But I'm not feeling it.

What I am feeling today, is frustrated.  And I'm still going with the flow, so here we go...

Today's just been one of those days.  Everything that can go wrong, seemingly is.  My smartphone just up and died last Friday night.  The replacement arrived yesterday, but I couldn't make it back to the store before they closed.  Was going to pick it up tonight instead, but as soon as I got into the office this morning, I was reminded that I volunteered for a CPR class this evening after work, so I won't be able to make it back to the store in time again, which means I'll be without a phone for another day.  My browser crashed my computer, costing me 45 minutes of my day that I desperately needed in order to get some of my work done trying to fix it.  Run to the bathroom real quick, there's an Out-of-Order sign on the door.  Run upstairs to use that bathroom instead, and the door slams back on a wound-too-tightly hinge, and the door handle nails me right in the middle of my forearm.  Go to get coffee, and the pot is empty, and no one has started another one brewing.  And I could keep going, but I'll stop there.

With each and every one of these little annoyances thrown in my way, I am reminded of ManniMoonYin's Universal Tautology #3:  "Look on the bright side.  Make the most of it.  Choose joy, and you will be joyous."

I'm trying.  I really am.  As soon as I realize that I'm pissed off or upset about some minor injustice committed against me by the universe, I say to myself, "Ok, what's the brightside here?"  And then I try to think of the situation in those terms, instead of in terms of getting fucked by fate.

Another day without my phone?  Brightside - learning life-saving techinques in a CPR class.  Bathroom out of order?  Brightside - get to walk a little farther, and up a flight of stairs, burning a few extra calories.  Door handle cracks me on the arm?  Brightside - the pain helps to toughen me up and gain endurance.  Have to brew another pot of coffee?  Brightside - get to spend a few minutes just standing still, relaxing, listening to the slow gurgle of the machine as it brews.   And, of course, each and every one of those difficulties also carries the implicit Brightside of giving me another opportunity to practice looking on the brightside.

But it's not always that easy.  From past experience, I remember that some of the hardest moments to maintain UT #3 were when the brightside wasn't so obvious.  Like losing an hour's worth of working time dealing with a computer crash.  It's hard to figure out how to be happy about that.  And somehow, the fact that it's an excellent opportunity to practice brightsiding doesn't really make up for the amount of frustration and aggravation I feel.

Sometimes, the answer becomes clear after a while, if you're patient, and attentive.  As in this case, when I restarted my browser (which had caused the crash), and, miracle of Miracles, I somehow hadn't lost all of my tabs and settings!  The relief that I felt just then was a wonderful physical sensation, and I allowed myself to just sink into the delicious feeling of it, like a hit, or an afterglow.  It was fantastic.

Or, perhaps a better example would be my mother's death.  The pain was devastating at first, and it was years before I could see how it was actually a good thing to have happened.  As much as we didn't want to admit it at the time, and as much as we didn't listen to her when she told us, the truth was that she was crazy, and she was in a lot of pain, and she was devastating our family.  And she knew that.  And her suicide was, at least in part, the ultimate act of love.  She sacrificed herself to save our family.  And she did save our family.  All of the happiness and joy in life that we have experienced since her death we owe, at least in part, to her.

(Broswer just crashed my computer again as I was writing this.  Brightside - an opportunity to practice patience and acceptance.  I didn't do very well, but at least I had the opportunity to try.)

But the hardest times of all, are when I try, but simply fail to imagine any brightside at all.  I think and I stretch and I reach and I try my hardest to come up with something, anything that could serve as a potentially beneficial outcome to some unpleasant turn of events, but I just can't come up with anything.  Or nothing I come up with is good enough.  It's times like that, I have to learn to trust.

The Christians would call that "faith" - belief stemming from a will to believe, rather than knowledge or fact.  But I don't use that word for this, and not just because I want to avoid all the xtian baggage that comes with it.  It's also just not what I mean.  Because, believe it or not, I actually consider myself to be a skeptic.  I know that might seem contradictory and hard to believe, considering some of the whacked-out, mystical, some might even say superstitious things I believe.  But I would call myself a skeptical believer.

Yes, I believe in magick.  I believe that I (or, really, anyone, for that matter) can affect changes in consensus reality through non-local means.  But I don't believe that just because I want to believe it.  Yes, I wanted to believe that magick was real and possible and that I could learn to do it.  But I didn't know if that was true or not.  And so I spent years and years studying and practicing and testing and experimenting.  And it was only after repeated, verifiable success after repeated, verifiable success that I was finally able to accept that yes, magick is actually possible.

So, yes, I believe.  But only because I was able to prove it to myself beyond all shadows of my doubt.  Hence, I'm a "skeptical believer."

And so, when I get in these situations where I cannot imagine any brightside to my misfortune, it is not faith that I rely on, but trust.  I fall back on all my past experiences where I have felt the Way, the Flow, the Tao, and remember how in those mystical moments the path has appeared in front of me from out of nowhere, brick-by-brick at my feet.  I remember every instance of hindsight realization, where I find that though I didn't get what I wanted, I got exactly what I needed, even when I didn't know that I needed it.  I remember every time that I didn't know what to do, and so followed my instincts for lack of any other response, only to find that my instincts had led me to do exactly what needed to be done.  I remember all of these moments and I remember how these lessons have been reinforced through experience over and over and over and over again throughout my entire life, even before I'd ever heard of "The Tao" - and I trust in that feeling.  It has never failed me.  Not once.

And, honestly, in those moments when I'm lost in the pain or sadness of it all, it's not the trusting that's the hard part.  It's remembering to trust in the first place.  Because we're told our whole lives that these things aren't possible.  That you aren't supposed to believe in them.  And that, if you do, you're crazy, or broken, or sick, or in some other way wrong.

I guess in that way, I'm lucky.  Because I've never given a fuck what anyone else has to say about what's right, or what's wrong, or what's true.

And that is my Tao of Choosing Joy to be Joyful.