Problems

The sense of problems niggles at me.  I can’t help but question what all this thinking, all this judgment, all this monotony, this constant striving to get somewhere at some point is – it is like a treadmill.  I have watched repetitive habit energies circling my body, brain, and emotions.  Survival tactics, looking into the deep dark chasm of anger and fear.  My emotions and thinking run towards the hills; they wonder, wander and wobble.

Sometimes I think I am alone, with only words to explain, yet the words seem limited.  They do not feel expansive enough to express the inexpressible.  However, that is the limitation that constricts the expression.  They are the color we add to the world.  Bombarded by them everywhere.  Some words are filled with fear, some longing, desire, yearning, empty, sad, angry, and frustrated.  The emotions seem rooted deeper than the words can offer as their form of expression.

So there is silence in the observing.  Yet, that silence is isolation because I find that words are what connect us to other humans so much of the time.  I relish in the quiet, like a cocoon.  However, at the same time, I feel a sense of isolation.  It seems without the drama in my life, the connections with those that surround me, there isn’t a connection at all.  When I wear the mask of “normal,” out of me come words and situations that I almost contrive to form connections.  Those connections always feel empty.  Without the struggle or the strife, my experience is that those that surround me do not have a need to care.

Do people not care for others when they are happy?  Does caring come in the form and relationship of struggle?  When is loving really loving?  When is genuine caring, genuine caring?  Do people ever just pop by to say hey, hi – how are you?  If my response is, “I am great,” what is left to talk about?  Those who surround me when I am great are left without words.  What do we talk about without “problems”?

How do people show kindness to those they care about when there is no “problem” to be solved?  Moreover, do we share kindness without a condition of needing fulfillment in return?  Where and how is intimacy born, and how does it flourish without connection?

We tend to look at the external to fill the internal.  Is it possible that any void that exists in our life is the void we create towards ourselves?  The question boils down to whom do we believe we are without problems?  How do we connect with ourselves without problems?  How do we relax into wholeness and well-being?  How do we love ourselves without problems?  How do we show ourselves love that is not focused on loving a problem but instead loving ourselves as we are in health, wealth, and wholeness?  My perception of the world around me comes in through me and therefore is me.  Who do I believe I would be, could be, without problems?  How do I enjoy myself, my life in the void of problems?  What does the voice in my head talk about without problems?  What can my mind do if those problems don’t exist to solve—if my mind was problem-less?

The only time any situation is a problem is because of how I look at that given situation.  Moreover, it becomes a problem when I decide I do not like it.  What if there was nothing to like or not like?  Could my mind exist for a day, a week, a minute without problems?  Do I believe I could exist without a problem for a day, a week, or even a minute?  What would become of me?  What would it look like to not create problems inside?

Or is the simplicity of potentially discovering I create problems something my mind has once again done and has decided that THIS “problem” thing is just another problem?

Btw, this picture?  Totally what I look like when I’m always “thinking” and solving “problems”!

(photo by: Rob Schreckhise)