An analogy to life that will blow your mind and bring you order.
We’re all looking for an answer, aren’t we?
As we clean the house. Do laundry. Make another meal. Put on another pair of underwear. Move another thing to another place in the house.
Again and again. And again. Then again.
My therapist once said, “You always have to go grocery shopping. Unless you're Oprah, then you have someone do it for you.”
He told me this the day I said I’d had a strange moment when I was putting on a pair of pants. I looked at them and thought, “How many more times am I going to have to put on a pair of pants?”
I’ve put on pants over 30,000 times.
I’ve brushed my teeth over 36,000 times.
I’ve eaten a full meal over 55,000 times, and let’s not even get started on snacking.
So what’s the point then, you might ask? Here we are, doing the best we can, making a go of it and all, and then it’s another pair of pants, another wipe of the teeth with a brush, another meal, and then you know – you’re dead.
Before I appear rather morbid, there is a point here. The point is what I’ve long said.
Our lives are a sentence.
Yes, a sentence like the one you’re reading now.
But we don’t live for the sentence.
We live for the period at the end of the sentence.
That’s a problem.
The period is the big raise, the event, the moment on camera, the wedding day, the money coming in, the test results that say you’re not sick, and the day you don’t feel grief after the death of someone you loved.
We wait for that period, don’t we? But what happens after a period? Another bloody sentence, that’s what. The period is nothing. It’s there then – BAM. Gone. Onto the next sentence.
I mean, look at what you’re reading. In the sentence before this one, there are exactly 35 characters (I’m counting letters and spaces) before the period, which is exactly one character.
One!
But you’d think we don’t even bloody know that. No. We just keep trying to get through those damn 35 characters so we can arrive at a period that fades the moment it appears.
We can’t lie to ourselves anymore, and we do that.
We have to wake up to the bottom line truth, which is hard as hell to accept, and that’s how we’re inordinately enjoying the wrong things.
Putting on one more pair of pants, brushing our fucking teeth again, and cooking another goddamn healthy chicken dish is downright infuriating. It’s not fair.
But…it is the system. And we must not fight it, for if we keep fighting it, we’re taking the shovel out of the gravedigger’s hand and throwing dirt into our faces. And blaming God or the Universe or some heathen of a politician for why we feel empty and lack wonder.
We have to grip the sides of this odd thing we’re all enduring and pull it very close and say absurd things like, “I’m gonna enjoy putting on these pair of pants, fuck all, because this is what it is. Putting on these goddamn pants and then socks and dear Lord, shoes are a mess and cumbersome, and off we go again.”
While also saying, “Yes, I want more. I want more than this one insufferable pant moment where I feel like a boob talking to myself about my pants alone in the bedroom while my wife or husband or lover or dog sleeps nearly, oblivious to the fact we’re all careening to our death, pretending the answer to pure bliss is acting like putting on pants is a revelatory act.”
Metaphysical, spiritual, and even some psychological circles will tell you that manifesting the period precisely as you want is not only possible but your duty. We’re now at the point where we can agree that thinking is off.
I know a best-selling self-help author. She did vision boards, meditations, trips to India, sound baths, crystals on her junk – she did it all. Know what made her rich, rich, rich, and famous? A book. It was on the NY Times best-seller list for over 200 weeks. She’s floating in dough. Know what she said to me?
She said (and I quote via an exhausting text chain) “I had no fucking idea that book would take off like it did. I wrote that thing because I had to get my shit together. I was floundering, broke, in my 40s, depressed, lost, but I knew there was something here. Something – God? I don’t know. I say that world, people flip out but you know this is the deal – consciousness is raising today. It is. We’re more psychic, more aware. But the way to get what we want? The actual thing and the how? I firmly believe it’s never what we say it is or in what form. It just is…living for now. So as far as I can tell, all my vision boards and fucking psychics and big-ticket coaches – they helped me to have the faith to keep going, but in the end? I never, ever, ever thought it was going to be that damn book. But I will say this – I had a hell of a time writing it, so maybe…maybe that’s it.”
Maybe. She wrote maybe. One of the most infamous self-help people on the planet, and…a shrug. But then there it is, right?
The keys being swiped off of the kitchen counter and put into our pocket has to be enough.
The kissing our dog goodbye as we get into the car on the way to the airport has to be enough.
Do we have to have a focal point where we want to end up?
Well, yes. It’s nonsensical to live otherwise. But is it guaranteed in the way we daydream and hope and pray?
You already know the answer to that.
But this part is thrilling.
When we live in the sentence, what comes to us in our heightened state of awareness is the ability to discern what we want to do. We sense it.
Our vision sharpens. Our hearts pound when we see or read about it. But since we’ve trained ourselves to live in the sentence, we detach from needing it to come as we want it and say, “Well, it’ll come as it’s meant to come, and I have no control over that, but let’s put on my pants and go about my day then, shall we?”
We don’t put on pants willy-nilly. We put on pants and guide our lives, to the best of our ability, to move in the direction of what we want and all the while (being a sentence-living person) detach like a madman(woman) from the outcome but know that the thing we want is coming.
What form? When? How?
Not our bother.
Put on your pants. Brush your teeth. Watch those thoughts and remember you aren't them.
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