transforming complaints into prayers (part 2 of how it began)
(Cont’d from the previous entry)
To be honest, I don’t think it was the book that shifted my life, so much as it was that this book came into my possession at just the right time.
It was just one of those ubiquitous new-agey books about how you can attract something into your life if you want to, but it was my very first foray into that world, and I took this book seriously–and I do mean, seriously.
I bought a new notebook, completed every single exercise that it said I should complete, didn’t skip a thing, and applied every ounce of steadfast earnestness to what I was wishing for: A job, a friend, a boyfriend.
I know. Of all the things to put steadfast earnestness behind in this world (solving world hunger? world peace? ending homelessness?) I wanted a job, a friend, and a boyfriend.
I had finished graduate school and was moving to Oakland, California, but I had yet to find a job. I knew no one. I wanted a man.
The week before I formally moved into my apartment, through a series of completely fortuitous circumstances, I was offered a job as an English professor. A few months later, I had the friend. A few months after that? I had the man.
There were synchronicities everywhere, and I was loving it, for the first time–I was loving, wildly ecstatically loving, my life.
I tend to find that this is a common experience: when you’re first introduced to the world of New Age living or transpersonal dynamics or whatever you want to call it, it’s like you’re high on life.
For me, it felt like I’d been living in a world of naysayers, and had suddenly discovered an entire culture where people didn’t talk of limitation–they talked of what was possible. I had needed these people, these ideas, this relentless commitment to optimism. My entire life, well-meaning people had warned me to be practical and to always have a backup plan.
This new crew was inviting me to believe something that I think I’d always believed at my core, anyway–that if I really wanted something, I could use that desire to fuel me.
(Now–as the years have gone by, my bullshit detector has been finely honed. I’m a staunch believer in energetics and the unexplained and that which cannot be seen, and yet–yet–I don’t really fork over the cash as readily as I first did when every other week I was riding the high of some new motivational book.)
Over the years, it has settled into quite the nice cocktail of Midwestern, down-to-earth, don’t-bullshit-me pragmatics and surrender, not knowing, not needing to know, not clinging to the illusion of knowing.
But even this was not enough. For awhile, I was wildly happy. I loved my job, my friend, my man.
And then, as things are sometimes wont to do, things fell apart.
“Dislocation” was the word of 2005. There was a dislocation of a bone in my foot. I was out on a routine run, felt something shift, and I would spend the next 2 years trying to figure out how to walk normally, again.
There was a dislocation in my friendship–the new friend I’d made, who I just utterly adored beyond reason, who I thought was smart and sassy and who I found funny and wise even on a random trip to Target to get toothpaste–was triggered as hell by a dynamic that was at work in our friendship. We’d talk about it, and never quite get underneath it, to the bottom of it.
There was a dislocation in my relationship–once past the honeymoon period, I was suddenly wrestling with these feelings of how to be in relationship with someone I loved deeply, but who also brought up all of my stuff, seemed to know just the right way to annoy me or piss me off.
There was a dislocation in my career as a college professor of English. I was disillusioned. I vacillated between feeling perpetually inadequate at making any difference whatsoever, up against 18+ years of poor education or disadvantaged backgrounds–and seething anger, taking it extremely personally that a student would waste my time by doing less than their best, cheating, plagiarizing, or getting mad at me when they earned anything less than an “A.”
By 2005, this is where I had arrived: I had gotten beyond the low-grade, constant depression as a facet of daily existence. I still felt sad at times, but I would, for the first time, have described myself as “happy.” I was curious, open, trying new things.
Yet–I was still left with a nagging sense of being unfulfilled, like something just wasn’t clicking quite right. I knew that I was doing some self-improvement work. I’d been studying Zen Buddhism for over a year. I had invested years into therapy and self-exploration.
But I didn’t wake up in the morning, excited about the day, about my life. My emotions swayed me–someone or something external to me could so easily “make” me mad or sad or frustrated. I had no control over it.
Complains & Prayers
I look back and often think that even when we are not aware of it, we are all living our lives as a series of complaints or a series of prayers (and gratitude, to me, is a prayer). I had been living my life as a series of complaints, up until I got my New Age Freak On and started living my life as a series of prayers.
As it would happen, the prayers I was offering up–prayers I didn’t even feel fully conscious of asking– would be answered. Three things would come into my life that would change everything.
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Part Two : Transforming complaints into prayers
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