I've decided that what I really want in life is everything.
I want to live in the country, and I want to be in the city. I want a practice that serves rural needs, and I want exposure to the wider demographic of urbania. I want to make money, and I want to spend serious time doing gratis work. I want chickens. I want art. I want room to be impulsive, and I want stability. I want to be a hands-on intellectual. I want to learn, hard, forever. I want sleep. I want clean windows. I want to love my little family, and run away from them on a regular basis too. I want to work with other people, and I want to work alone. I want to build my business. I want to spend time growing and cooking good food. I want friends. I want to stay home. I want to see more of the world. I want to know things in my gut. I want to fling myself willy-nilly into living.
I'm not settling down. It's just not happening. Yes, I'm tired, but I'm more tired when I just stop. I want some of EVERYTHING. Forget choosing one or the other. I choose it all.
There is a concept in Chinese medicine, and I can't pretend to really understand it much at all yet, of shaoyang, or a pivoting place. A door that opens and closes. Being able to transition from one thing to another smoothly. Well-oiled hinges. That's what I want. Smooth hinges. I want to go in, or out, and find pasture.
If you're shaoyang, just be shaoyang. Everyone else should be what they are too. But I need to choose to be what I actually am.
Whew. Glad I got that sorted around.
4 comments:
Many many years ago I realized I was never going to be that peaceful hippy sort of person who sat around and said "ohm" or whatever. Many years later my midwife said, "Compassion isn't really your path." Well. So I think I do get this. This IS something to a "path", to not zipping a little this way, a little that. But if I'm getting shaoyang at all, it IS a "path" so to speak, a way of being.
The really funny thing is, although I would still say that I just don't like people (mostly because they infuriate me), how peaceful and compassionate I have become. By accepting that I am not.
That's a beautiful story CG.....and I think paradoxical is the new 'normal'. Everything and nothing, and acceptance of it all. Beautiful post :)
In my field of work, there's so much talk about cultivating serenity, and intense people are looked down on as being less "evolved" or something. But gordangit, serene doesn't have a foothold in my personality at all, and I have to struggle not to categorize the serene as pathologically passive. I do try. However, that serene stereotype never got under my skin as a "must try to be this" sort of thing.
But I've always carried this picture of mastery in myself, that somehow I *should* be able to fixate on something and completely absorb it for the rest of my life and be satisfied with that. That *should* isn't working out for me, and as my beloved chiropractor said to me this afternoon, my gift is being conversant enough with a LOT of different modalities that I'm able to choose the right one for the task at hand, and synthesize hybrids as needed. Bless her for knowing me like that, we all need people to tell us who we are. But yes, that's what I do best, so I need to just abandon myself to my in-and-out, round-and-round shaoyang nature and maximize the benefit of it, rather than beating myself up for not being something else.
Have a wonderful weekend, ladies!
"Smooth hinges." you say.
So here's wishing you smooth hinges!
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