Always, I awake and cohere, and go to work (if I have any that day), and it occurs to me that this is roughly the proper way to live. I don’t have recurring nightmares: I invent new ones.
I am open to new experience. I wait and listen and see what happens, then I try to learn from it. Every day is a completely new day. Nothing is the same, even if nearly everything is the same.
And in my contemplation, I was pondering that the mission of the early Buddhists, who were sent off to beg and wander the rest of their lives, was to treat every new day of the rest of their lives as a new day.
What I find is that when you risk your current understanding of yourself, it refreshes, in a slightly new way. The picture moves, perhaps, but is still recognizable. It’s still you. But you are learning flexibility, trust, to leap into the vortex with faith.
And everyone has their own refresh rate. You are clearly NOT the same person you once were. The river does not stop flowing. But if you live in a tight social system, you are reaffirmed daily that you are who you are. You see the same faces, hear the same names, do the same things, walk the same streets. Your image of you is presented back to you by others regularly. This is a high refresh rate.
Those who live more solitary lives have much slower refresh rates. They go longer between validations that they are who they are and not someone else. And what I am finding is that with a very low refresh rate, you sort of free-flow. Your identity does not seem as fixed and solid. This feels, initially, like incipient madness. But if I was going to go crazy, it would have happened long ago. Long, long ago.
No: what this becomes, with time and practice and flexibility, is a new way of being, of being a person in this world. You find a more stable foundation of trust and hope and joy. I woke up very happy this morning, for no reason I could discern. This is the point: it is something you allow, not something you create or force. It is a gift which visits in the night.