Meaning and Purpose

I'm in a middle-ageless funk, a huge pool of loss with no bottom, a nest with the twigs blowing away in a cold, cold wind. It's a perfect place for existential angst of every variety. What's worse is that there is no story I can weave fast enough to fill the gaps--no sparkling distraction to keep my gaze off the dissolving structures I used to stand on. Sad times.

Still...

There is something very...oh, words are failing me. There is something real that I can't define about watching every effort get immediately sucked into that freezing maelstrom out there/in here. The Earth, the Story, the Mind, she is a-changing, and there is nothing I can do in the face of such momentum. So I stand still. I surrender. It's not as if I have a choice.

I am learning about my "will", about the meaning of persistence (a temporal fight), and the seeming waste of personal energy it is to continually beat my brain against my own walls. I say "seeming", because there really is no such thing as a waste of energy, no matter what opinion arises. As I throw one more pebble into the mother of all chasms in my life, I realize that each action happens just so, exactly on cue, with precisely the force necessary to remind me that making myself into anything is futile. And perfect.

So I'm standing in the shower, wondering what to do with myself once I get done with all the dailies. Is there something to look forward to? What state should I attend? Should I make a huge change in routine, or resign myself to my fate, or leave everything and everyone behind? Maybe I should just continue to "work on myself"--you know, yank all my issues into a ruthless psychological glare (with high-powered magnification). At the very least, this makes me believe, for a minute, that I'm doing something worthwhile and, perhaps, rewarding. Somehow.

I hear the thinking, and I don't remember if I washed my face. There is a deep, restless, furious churning going on. I want to run around the block. I am anything but content. I am not happy. I don't even know, for god's sake, what happiness is, anymore.

Some time later, drying my hair with a towel, silence falls inside. My thoughts dissolve, and I watch them, and I am still the same, still the same. No matter what I fill myself with or throw away or grieve over or welcome, I am still the same. Water doesn't drown it, fire can't burn it, earth can't bury it and air can't breathe it! Whatever this is stays undisturbed, untouched. Tension and laxity, suffering and joy all share the same vast, spaceless space.

This is the point where I touch what's real. I fall in. There is a baseless, non-reactive equanimity, with a tendency to delight in Itself. I am that, underneath all of the thinking and feeling, inclusive of both. It does not relieve any pressure--pressure loops out of and returns to this. No relieving, and no necessity for it--but both pressure and release are completely viable options. I can "waste" my energy in suffering and finding the end of it. I have all the room I need. It may furrow my brow even more, but there is no furrowing This...I may as well draw a line in the water.

What does this mean? I don't know. To what purpose? No idea. When I cease trying to find and do the "right" thing, the correct Maria, the appropriate response, I am free to be anything, anywhere. So much freedom--nothing holding me down, no mistakes, nothing to regret. I can't even fathom this, it's so simple.

But there is a direction--yes, this is true--there is a leaning into joy, into senseless delight, into pointless contentment. It's a deeper, wider thing than emotion, than the brief ups and downs that stories are so full of.

This, too, leaves no trace. If I try to hang on to that invisible ship cutting a wake through endless seas, it becomes a piece of flotsam in a swirl of foam.