Something Dramatically New

Following up on the last blog, I've been thinking of my life without an escape plan and no ability to downclimb, metaphorically or otherwise...

What I love most about climbing is the here and now experience of it. I don't climb often, but when I do, the reality of the here and now in the moment on real rock is a beautiful thing. There's never a moment for me of "can I do it?" It's just doing it. Nothing else matters.

I was talking with friends today about the illusion of hope and its dangers. At first they thought me morbid, because I decided to "unfriend" hope. Perhaps they still think me morbid. I didn't mean it in that sense, but in the sense that when I have hope for something, it resides in the future, which isn't here yet. The shadow side of hope for some is despair, and for me is that that which I'd hoped for and perhaps even had, will disappear. It strikes me that those feelings relate to fear, and all fear is based in the past.

I need to repeat this, for myself as well as my blog readers:

ALL FEAR IS IN THE PAST

Everything we fear isn't based upon the newness of an experience we might face, but an experience in our past when something failed, or we had a bad time of it. The idea of even trying something new or different is terrifying for some (including me), because we've got something anchoring us to a time in the past when it didn't work out as we'd have liked it to.

So, here's my issue with hope and its shadow: Hope is all about the future, its shadow is all about the past and when I get hooked into feeling hope, I find myself in a dance with the past and future. I suspect that on some level, we all do. So where is the here and now moment? It's not the hope, it's not the shadow, and it's not the dance itself. There is no time or space for the here and now moment.

Why do we so fear the here and now? What could we do with the reality of it? When I'm on real rock, I know it intimately. There's really no choice in the matter, if I'm going to climb. All instincts are honed toward what is immediately before me. Choices are made though experimentation, experience and and what works.

When I'm living in the here and now moments away from rock climbing, magic can happen. Miracles are seen with new eyes, because my mind's not racing toward some illusion destination, or caught up in some strange, bad place in my past.

Ironically, in my post 8 days ago, I talked about how I don't cry, and found myself uncontrollably weeping these past few days. That's the part that makes the here and now difficult, because you've got to deal with the raw emotion as it comes. I can't schedule it or put it off, because doing such things will kill you in the end. My weeping had nothing to do with regret, and everything to do with being truly sad.

I stayed in my here and now moment then with the tears, and presently I am feeling some wonderous sense of peace. I'd told my friends if I "unfriended hope" that perhaps peace would find me and it did. It's not that I have any resolution whatsoever with what's going on in my life or around me. That's a chaotic swirl still. It's more that I found the peace within my soul beyond the darkness I had to walk through to get to it. Some might call that God's grace, others serenity.

I don't want to label the gift the Creator gave me, define it or put it in a box. I don't want to hold onto it with both hands, fearful that it will go away. I only want to acknowledge the beauty of it, and in my prayers, send it along to all others who are suffering and struggling through their darkness. Because to hold onto any one thing too tightly with both hands demonstrates a lack of faith that it will return again when needed. It also doesn't afford me the opportunity to reach out to others, or to real rock, as the case may be.

And that is something dramatically new.