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Training Wheels

trainingwheels
Learning Balancing

Learning to ride a bicycle might be the perfect training for life. It teaches the same lesson we each encounter when learning to walk, but were too small to retain. Both teach the clear distinction between balance and balancing, which might be trying to impart some acknowledgement of the much more significant difference between being and becoming.

We ask our children just what we were asked as children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Well-intended but none-the-less insidious, our question begs an unfortunate response. They’ll have to choose. They’ll aspire, then, to a notional state their earliest life lesson might have clearly demonstrated couldn’t exist.

At sixty, I’ve almost discarded the notion that I might be something when I finally grow up. I’m still wondering when my growing might slow enough that I might reasonably declare myself grown. But then I consider what might follow this curious achievement. Slip over here for more ...

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Synchronicity- The Movie Made Just For Me

clackboard
I know when I’m in my groove because everything I encounter seems perfectly placed, as ready-to-hand, as ready-to-mind; as if in a movie produced expressly for me.

This seems enough of a not-everyday experience that I feel especially blessed whenever I encounter it. I’m reasonably certain that I cannot, by mere volition or will, force it to occur. Perhaps I’m subtly letting go whenever this movie-like magic appears, unconsciously stepping aside from standing in my own path. How could I know?

I do know that a certain openness seems to surround me these days, as if my molecules had elbow room; space for the unexpected to nudge into play. I’m getting better at going with these surprising flows, acknowledging their presence, accepting their utility, and leveraging their possibilities. Slip over here for more ...

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Gravity and Levity

gravityandlevity
Peter Pan might have been the most honest of my childhood archetypes. He endlessly proclaimed that he’d never grow up, insisting that he’d always be a boy. The rest of us have had to pretend that we would, could, and eventually did grow up, though our claims sometimes seem doubtful.

I questioned that my grandfather, who I remember as a grizzled coot with nicotine-stained fingertips and emphysema-thickened chuckle, ever was a boy, though he had a mile-wide mischievous streak and an unrelenting glint in his eye. His sixth grade school photo shows a barefoot Tom Sawyer look-alike, and I’m certain that he never fully out-grew those patched overalls and that soup bowl haircut. Slip over here for more ...

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