Lifeletter #140: I Don’t Know You

I remember a moment in the car with my mother, about twenty five 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. I will not keep 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.”

Sometimes we touch right into the openness of this moment, but most of us don’t really want to live here. Human beings hold on to the past. It’s how our brain is wired. Letting go is not so easy. And this deeply ingrained tendency to hold on is responsible for so much suffering, in our individual lives and in our collective. What we are not able to let go of gets passed down into the next generation. This has been researched and documented now, in the family constellation work, in the world of trauma healing, and in neuro-science. It really seems a little crazy, does it not? Why would we keep on holding on to the past, when all that it brings us is suffering, separation and conflict?

I’ve discovered that 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 learn to surprise each other, to surprise ourselves. 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.

Step toward the cold surface,
say the old prayer of rough love
and open both arms.

Those who come with empty hands
will stare into the lake astonished,
there, in the cold light
reflecting pure snow,

the true shape of your own face.

 ~‘Tilicho Lake’  David Whyte

 

with love,

Shayla

 

photo credit: Jannaca Chick