Being in Time: Like a Baby
My dear friends,
I trust that this post meets you well and that you all had a great week, where you took moments to appreciate your life and your being. My week went well, albeit a bit stressful because of an assignment and exam I had to prepare for. I wanted to write this post with a clear head, so I decided to delay it a few days. I apologise for keeping you waiting.
The theme of the last few weeks can be summed up with one word - focus. Dwelling in the past is distracting. Worrying about the future is distracting. Giving up on the journey to our desires, is distracting. These forms of distraction are what keep us in a perpetual cycle of wanting something, attempting it, but never quite getting there.
The attitude of focusing on the present, as well as a refusal to give up, is what helps us when we are walking or running on our path, and we stumble and fall. A lot of the time, with that fall comes regret and anxiety, I should not have … what if I fall again … those two things contribute to the fears that fuel the flame to give up. However, when we take a pause from those thoughts, and see the situation for what it really is - just a fall, not a sentence on the rest of our lives, it helps us see that the responsibility is on us to get up.
We can blame our shoes for not being sturdy enough, or our institutions for not teaching us to run well enough. We can do all that, but those things will only work to make us forget that our legs are our own. And the power to get up and continue lies within us. We can worry about a potential fall once we do get up and we can try to protect ourselves by remaining in our fallen state, but in this way, we are deciding that the comfort of avoiding failure, is better than the pleasure, satisfaction and fulfilment we will experience when we get up and continue to our destination. We are failing to see that the fall teaches us a better way to walk or run. It may even serve as a forced rest that is much needed. Or a chance to reset and recalibrate, but it is never an indication to stop being who we are.
Getting up only to stand on one spot is a form of progress, but if we never take the step forward, it is no different from not getting up at all. We have to use the knowledge that we are responsible for the movement of our legs and, in this moment, we can take one step forward (not worrying about whether the step will result in another fall) and then another.
In short, let us learn from babies. A child will one day walk, but that is only because she does not give up when she falls. She does not know that for sure she will one day walk, all she is focusing on is getting up and reaching that toy her father is waving at her to cajole her to walk to him. She doesn’t see a fall as an indication that she will never walk, she sees it for what it is, a fall, nothing more, nothing less. She does not remember that yesterday I could not stand or that when I tried to walk, I fell. She just gets up today and continues the struggle to walk. She does not give up on learning to walk. She is consistent until one day she is walking, slowly, uncertainly, but she made it. Another day she is surer of herself. And before her parents can believe their eyes, she is running to greet them when they enter the room.
Perhaps this is another take on being asked to be like children, because of their ability to forget and move on. One day a child cannot move without being carried, at some point you cannot catch up with him before getting out of breath. Everything in life that we have come to be able to do has taken time and effort. But it has also taken that ability to forget, to avoid worry and to be unrelenting.
As we start this new month of March, let us take a page from this baby’s book and commit to making the journey towards our desires.
Love,
O.F.P