My morning meeting has a three minute meditation and then the floor is open for random sharing. But the shares I like are not that random. They have a point, and generally the point is growth.
What makes growth? Challenge and perseverance. Every day I hear people facing challenges and persevering. They lost their job, their spouse, their right to drive, their place in the bedroom, their invitation to family dinner. They lost their way. Lost their will to live. They lost their faith in their ability to survive, to not feel miserable, to matter, to be of service, to have value, purpose, a reason to live. And they’ve persevered because we tell each other to keep going.
We tell each other to keep going because each time I tell someone to keep going it reminds me to keep going. Just keep going.
Randomly I shared today that I don’t get a ton out of talking to GD by myself all alone like, “Gee Gd please help me.” No. I need spirit or whatever you wanna call it to talk to me through the people I surround myself with. That’s what works for me. That’s why I go to meetings and I listen, especially to the people whose shares I don’t like and the people whose shares I do like.
The ones I don’t like probably have something about them that reminds me of how I don’t want to be, but how I am sometimes. So listening to those shares with compassion, or like what they say in the book, with “patience, tolerance, kindliness, and love” helps me learn to practice feeling that way towards myself, the darker, less appealing parts of myself.
You know, the parts of me that could watch tv and eat pineapple with the drapes closed and the phone turned off for days on end? Maybe for years? Yes, the parts of me that are so fugging self-centered and lazy and tired and scared and wanting soothing from everything with everything. The egomaniac with an inferiority complex? Yucky. Quite tough to accept that part too. But acceptance is the solution to all my problems and accepting those parts of me will I know, I can feel it, help free up the other parts.
The other parts of me, the nice, shiny, productive, happy parts like the nice, shiny, productive, happy shares. The shares about people going out and about and doing things, despite whatever discomfort they may have. They share about how wonderful it is to be alive, all the things they do to maintain that wonder. They share about how good life is, like ripe strawberries and sour cream my grandfather used to make, before I knew animal fat was very very bad for me and strawberries were picked by unfairly treated workers and coated in pesticide poisons. Juicy red pink juice and the smile my grandpa would have watching me eat them with gusto at the long shiny table, propped up on pillows with a white linen napkin tied around my neck to protect my princess dress.
My grandfather Grandpa Bill Finsten. He loved me and I loved him. It was a simple relationship. We appreciated each other. When I went to live with him a little over ten years after that, when I was a troubled teen recovering from anorexia, he still seemed to appreciate me. He would make me dinner, usually a chicken, a veg, and a potato, and I’d eat it, and appreciate it. Pretty regularly he’d sneak an apple pie standing at the kitchen sink. I’d sneak a huge bag of cheese popcorn while doing homework in the kitchen. We never mentioned those things to each other.