When there's nothing left to fight
Or, how to be where you are
When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the present moment is always a problem to fix, and I struggle and grumble and worry and strategize, facing off with the oncoming onslaught of infinite nows that present me with all of the very real and entirely imagined concerns of life, I can tend to find myself not living it so much as managing it, tempering it, taming it and attempting to control it. I know intimately just how exhausting and depleting and distracting this effort is, and maybe you do, too — and yet we fight on, wondering when we will find The Answer, be on top, finish the project, be through the hard season, be good enough, make the next milestone, get inspired, be rid of this displeasure or pain, and make it to the other side, where our life can really begin as it aught to. Like we are stuck in some strange intermission, our boots entrenched in the mud of some mistake or misstep that is keeping us from the way it should be.
I’ve been in this place, searching for the answer to cure a growing dissatisfaction, regularly needing today to be fixed, and have been increasingly interested in noticing how much the scraggly and empty discontent is actually a product of the idea that anything about this is wrong to begin with, rather than the thing itself. I’ve been paying attention to the interesting shift that happens to the layers of suffering in our lives when we offer ourselves some version of the thought, the plan was for me to be here. Strife evaporates when we see our current situation as the precise execution of something important, penned out long ago by forces far greater than us.
The simple consideration that not only there could never have been any other way, but that this was always what was supposed to be in order for us to reach our most actualized and meaningful life, is often all it takes for us to stop the fight and the struggle and allow it to all be as it is. And this is certainly not a new idea. Humans have been offering this notion to themselves and their communities for millennia. For some it’s by faith in a god’s plan, some get there through a trust in the invisible reasons that make anything happen in the universe, some get there by a studied, mindful interest in the present moment, among any of the other myriad available paths. And while it can be easy to dismiss this as platitudes or some sidestepping of responsibility (and surely, sometimes it can be), these are a turning away — and I think when it’s done right, it is actually a turning towards (ourselves, our lives), and can be our clearest, shortest path to the often confounding but life changing magic of acceptance.
What remains when there’s nothing left to fight?