I remember a moment in the car with my mother, about 23 years ago. We were having an argument about the nature of human beings. I was listening to her talk about the impossibility of real forgiveness. “It’s just an idea,” she said, “That’s not how human beings really live. You can’t just let go like that.”
In response to her words, I felt a burning in my heart, a fire that said “No, I will not live like that, holding on, and closing down my heart.”
Over the years since then, I’ve realized that in one way, my mother was right. (“Yes Mum, you hear me, I’m a lot more humble now, about how long this takes.”) There were so many times that I thought I had forgiven, and I found out I had not. There were little pockets left in me, of resentment, of regret, places where my heart was stuck on the idea that “It shouldn’t have happened like that.”
Human beings do hold on to the past. It’s how our brain is wired. Letting go is not so easy. Sometimes we touch right into the openness of this moment, but most of us don’t really want to live here.
The present moment is not a cozy place. It’s the home of the unknown. It waits for me always, like a field of new-fallen snow. If I come into the moment carrying what I think I know, I haven’t really met the moment at all. Meeting it with all my accumulated knowledge is like trying to make love with all my clothes on.
It feels so precarious to come naked into the moment. So I put on my armour, my protection. I have every right to do this–to carry around this heavy sack of past experience and learning. It’s what has made me who I think I am.
Who I really am, without all of this, is an unimaginable blessing. In spite of all our hard-wiring, in the face of our ancient and primal conditioning, we can discover how to be this way with each other. Other people have done this. We can do it too. It’s not easy. But it is possible.
I can turn my face to what is possible, turn my heart in this direction. This is my choice. No-one is holding a gun to my head and preventing me from making this choice, over and over again. To relax out of everything I think I know, everything I have been taught, into what is here.
We can give each other permission to meet here, in this virgin territory. We can uncork the joy that bubbles up from our depths when we look at our child, our friend, our beloved partner, and say, “I don’t know you, I really don’t. You are a new being, in this moment. Everything I am remembering about you, is gone.”
In this high place
it is as simple as this,
leave everything you know behind.
David Whyte
With Love,
Shayla
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