Rabbit Holes and Nuggets

Sometimes an unelected time-out occurs for no obvious reason.

So too with Beneath the Froth – I can only put it down to thought trails, many of them, that inevitably led down rabbit holes where wonder frequently bumped into frustration. Yet the distraction offered by these trails felt nourishing amidst the doom and gloom that seems impossible to circumvent while journeying through each day. Awareness is poked, at minimum, by the occurrence of cascading disasters, portraying a life that teeters between dire scarcity and imminent threat. Even on an individual level, daily living feels infected by world pain.

A sense of the ominous is fed by the magnitude of control, restriction, coercion and oppression exerted globally – all measures that narrow the paradigm of choice – while transmission platforms justify the measures in the light of a need for safety.

This was getting to me. The heaviness of it all made me yearn for lightness. And that word helped the penny to drop – lightness is the polar opposite of heavy gloom. We live in a world of polarity, night and day, up and down and so on. You cannot have one without the other because by definition it would not exist. How can something be down if there is no up? And therefore, my perception of gloom depends on my awareness of its opposite pole.

I decided, for the sake of my well-being and the positive ramifications of that, to look on the bright side of life….. (Yes, I too could break into song now!) I can choose to favour that, not in denial of the former, but in the knowledge of the latter. And as the bright shines more strongly, so too will the dark gradually recede, in my thought projections. It’s not a Pollyanna dream, but possibly a Marry Poppins one where it’s up to me to make it happen, not with a long magical word but rather four short ones, complementing a mindset that follows the heart’s direction.

And saying lightness flicked the switch on for me, so that’s how I began my navigational trip to the bright side - through the exploration of a few virtues that reside within the polar opposite to the current forces that fuel my sense of the ominous. Virtues that really resonate with me would be the first to be missed when suppressed by the forces at play. The very word ‘force’ strongly suggests one of them. And that is gentle – I’m not even saying gentleness which directs you more to the concept, but gentle which invites you to be it. Imagine gentle and what do you see and feel? Apply it to anything, encouragement, your disposition, parenting, and then consider the opposite, force, coercion. Which one promotes growth, brings sustained benefits and peace, and demonstrates trust in the autonomy of individual pace of self, of others and life? Which one is truly strong?

Trust goes hand-in-hand with gentle, yet it would appear to be a rare practice today, or am I being overly cynical? It is difficult to fully embrace trust in a climate of systemic distrust, where our conditioning is aligned with competition and a scarcity mindset. Passwords, locks, identification cards, certifications, worry and so on, all fly in the face of trust.

Your degree of trust in life is correlated to your quality of life.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, author, scholar and Benedictine monk is known for a saying which he regards as the foundation of everything and, the only thing you can say, and that is, “Trust in life”. If you look back on your life, he believes, even the worst things that happened, turned out to be life giving.

So how do we align ourselves with trust? How do we do this without doubt hampering our progress. Consider this scene: you are standing between two doors which are facing each other. One door represents trust and the other doubt. The doors are tied to each other with a rope, but with enough slack for the doubt door to be open. If you open the trust door, the doubt door will close. So in a nutshell: it’s not so much about shutting the door on doubt, but opening the door to trust. Opening one, closes the other.

Image: Sandra Garcia

I find it difficult to describe how this is helping me. It could well sound like magic and perhaps it is, but when I feel the claws of unease begin to tighten around me, I say the word trust to myself, shining my inner spotlight on it and immediately feel a release. Any potential spikes of despair or anxiety lose their momentum.

Trust is not always measurable or deducible providing straightforward steps to an outcome that you can foresee and thus relax into. It’s a mysterious force that grows the more you invest in it. Trust sheds the scales from your vision, from your intuition and your experience of life. It gives you the freedom to create experiences.

As Brother Steindl-Rast inferred, what else can you do but trust in life? Without trust, risks are beyond reach, with the need for caution and protection obstructing expansive growth.

And that leads to my next word which is acceptance. Another incredibly efficient tool for the release from fixating on matters which you cannot change, including other people’s thoughts, choices and opinions.

For me these words together naturally translate into going with the flow. They are key concepts that have become my go-to-words, my conceptual nuggets, which help to nip mental buds of prophetic doom as they emerge. I keep them in the pocket of my mind, within reach of the frontier of my awareness. I just have to remember to reach for them before I become too enveloped in unfavourable thinking. This is a learning curve, and sometimes, just as a sneeze can catch you before you reach a tissue, so too, can a ‘black dog’ thought. But it is never too late to still reach for a nugget word to switch on the light.

All this talk about the bright side or positivity is not woo-woo, blah blah - it is the wise and healthy thing to do. Besides the fact that it feels good, it triggers the release of beneficial hormones. The biochemical activity in your body is affected by the story that unravels in your mind.

The best we can do is write a nugget-inspired page turner.