Living Life Without a Map

Looking back over the years to my travels, my most memorable trips have been without a map and no real destination.  One trek started in San Jose California where my wife and I rented a car for a week and  journeyed down the coast without any planning, or knowing what was around the corner or where we would eat or sleep.  

Another time we drove north in Montana to Highway 2 and turned left and followed the road wherever it would take us.  We stopped often and ate at places that were not franchises and met people who were “colorful” from my experience of life.  I loved the local lady who came to the café to eat lunch with a fly swatter.  The owners did not take care of the flies so she did, on her own terms. 

For some time, I wondered why these trips were so memorable.  It wasn’t until I began to study Vipassana Meditation that I realized the key ingredient.  It is the difference between FLUID-ITY and SOLID-ITY.  Life and everything in life is fluid and is in a constant state of flux, flow, and change.  To live with more safety and certainty, we like to see things as SOLID.  So we freeze things in our beliefs, opinions, and memories as being a certain way.  We become attached to seeing things only a certain way.  We take pictures and refer to that as real.  And use maps to plan a vacation so that we arrive somewhere we know.  We want something that we can count on, that is certain.  And when it is all over, we write an obituary that sums up our life as we have defined it.  But is that reality?  My awareness now says no.

And even though we are always making new maps for our life, the truth is that they are immediately inaccurate and incomplete as soon as we outline them.  If we could see things as they really are, and we can; we would realize that life is impermanent.  Everything is in a state of continuous and constant change and flux.  Allowing FLUIDITY to be the case in our lives moves us from an arm chair traveler to an adventurer.  The possibilities are unlimited because we did not define them before we started.

Are you ready for an adventure right in your own back yard?  You will have to sloooow down and be here now.  We must become the Watcher, the Observer.  We allow into our awareness whatever comes with out placing a judgment on it.  With equanimity we see what we see and find what unfolds before us as “enough”.  We allow it to be so without attempting to change it.

And the events and relations in our life, good, bad or indifferent we deal with equanimity.  This does not mean we don’t make new choices for other outcomes we seek.  We just quit struggling with the content and drama of daily living.  We can then act without any reaction to the all the changes all about us, all the time.  This new awareness of life’s fluidity frees us from a lot of grief and misery and spent energy attempting to change things to our satisfaction. 

I have a son who spent a year as a camp caretaker of a lodge with a pond.  He loved the week days because the camp was silent and he had it all to himself.  However, the weekends were rented out to various rambunctious groups and the peace was usually broken with the noise. 

Yet one group was different.  A group of meditators came and there was no noise.  All was silent.  And daily they would take a walk around the pond.  Slowwwlly.  My son said it drove him nuts to see how long it took them to walk around that small pond.  What was five minutes for him was an hour or more for them.  And then they turned around and did it again the next day.  What were they seeing and observing that he didn't? 

 So I decided to try that.  My wife had an hour long massage and I was waiting in the car.  I chose to get out and walk around a tree, the same tree, for an hour.  There arises an experiential wisdom that comes from such efforts.  It doesn't come from our book learning or our reasoning.  I found that one of the first things we lose is our SEPARATION from other things in life.  And such wisdom is without words that do it justice until we spend an hour observing a tree for ourselves.  The awareness’s I gained about that tree were amazing.

Yet our greatest adventure awaits us to go within and observe ourselves and how we think and what we sense and feel.  And for most, they are too distracted by their activities to be aware of what is happening within.  We are the only creatures on earth that can observe one’s self.  Self awareness is the door way to being liberated from our suffering and misery.  And if we let go of our maps, we have no where to go but to be here NOW.  And oh what an adventure awaits us.