The Ink-Pot and the Palette

After a ridiculous two weeks at work (during which a single bad posting in the financial system resulted in...well, many hours of overtime and phone calls to Germany and hair-on-fire crisis mode, and generally a collapsing universe), I finally escaped late yesterday for four days off.

I planned to be happy and positive and all living-room-painty. But when I went to bed, I found my thoughts straying to the negative. I felt outside myself, alienated. Stress does that. It's awful. I woke up this morning in a tenuous frame of mind, rested but not chipper. Where, I wondered, are my happy, positive thoughts?

So I got dressed and made coffee and started my laundry, and pretty soon there was a knock on my door. A nice group of Jehovah's Witnesses were standing there--a man, a woman, some little children--holding out a leaflet.

( Funny how things come along. )

I've been experimenting with the first of Neale Donald Walsch's three "Secrets to Ending the Struggle and Making Your Life Work," the one that says:

• Your growth process is complete
• You were already fully evolved when you got here
• You don't need to become who you are, you just need to be who you are...

...and so forth.

For an uptight perfectionist like me, the obvious place to start was to put self-improvement on hold for a bit; to resist the temptation to fix just one more problem, read one more self-help blog, try one more method.

( Trickier than it sounds. )

I astonished myself yesterday by listening to an interview with Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations With God books of a decade or so ago.

I never read the books because I'm not much for God, and have spent a good portion of my adult life on the agnostic-to-atheist spectrum, with a recent sojourn in the spare, dry country of Absolute Determinism sans even the smallest parasol of spirituality. But it's harsh and depressing there, and I've been flirting with the ineffable again lately because dammit, it just feels better.*

So anyway. In the interview, Walsch discusses "three secrets to ending the struggle and making your life work," and it was so refreshing that I was able to do some hand-waving around the God stuff and just absorb it. I took lots of notes.

( Secret Number One: Your growth process is complete. )

I propose to test the efficacy of this theory over the next few days and report back. I got off to a good start, feeling peaceful and joyous and full of grace, but then the whole wide world started annoying the crap out of me--a phenomenon I've often noticed when my inner defenses are feeling wobbly, so it's probably a good sign, since the inner defenses need to come down.

I'm beginning to see that I need far more stripping-away than I need adding-onto. The accretion of decades' worth of false beliefs, negative images, and general crust will require some serious spiritual exfoliation before the real me shows through. Hopefully there will be no need for a volcano.


*"Why are you so happy all the time?" someone reportedly asked the Dalai Lama, who reportedly answered, "Because it feels better."