Friday, January 17, 2014

streams of thought...january 17th, 2014

It is a truly an amazing thing… here I am sitting in my home… Tigre curled up in a ball next to my desk… having my morning coffee and what do I hear?  A train.
Now, I live in the beautiful Washington Park area, which is a nice quiet kind of neighborhood.  We have more joggers and dog walkers than we do cars… ok maybe I exaggerate just a little but seriously our little neighborhood is nicely tucked away in Denver. So, I smile when I hear that sound moving into my home… into my room… into my previously and soon to be once again a quiet place.
I smile not just because it is so quiet that I can hear the distant moan of a train’s horn but I smile because I simply enjoy trains. A tad old fashioned, I know. It is actually quite…dare I say romantic?
Another thought that comes to mind, when I think of trains, is the idea of transition. After all, one of the greatest unification tools used to bring this amazing country into being was the advent of the coast to coast rail system.  I know that currently we see trains with a mixed sense of emotions. Some would say that they are too slow. Some would say that they do not serve our population very well.
Others might point to the fact that they are truly an escape mechanism… and in that regards they will cause us to slow down.
For me to travel to my other favorite city of Seattle, it would take me two days on a train; while, if I traveled by plane I could arrive there in a matter of hours. Here is the difference…I would miss the most beautiful part of getting there.  I would miss the transition of coming from the arid eastern slope of Colorado, a mixture of plains and mountains, to the more lush green scenery of the beautiful Northwest.
Transitions. An interesting word because to me it is a mixture of two words… transfer + positions. We simply are moving from one place to another. Some desire and dare I even say yearn for transitions to take place.
Politically, many individuals want it all the time.
Emotionally, it does happens to us all the time. We can be euphoric over a relationship, career, house, possessions, and many other aspects.  However, in a moment’s time we can feel a sense of disappointment that a relationship was not what we thought… a career ended up being a dead end…possessions become used and antiquated.
Physically, we will typically look for it at least twice a year. At the beginning of the year and when it is time to get out the bathing suits.
Spiritually, we want it or experience it when something deeply impactful happens. An illness. A life threatening event. A journey on to our “mat”. A natural disaster. A major national event that moves us so deeply that we act to show concern. The birth of a child.
We all live in and want transition until…it requires a deeper movement. We lose a job and the only one that seems to be available is hundreds or thousands of miles away. We lived a life that was not truly authentic with who we are and then we are met with the stark reality that we need to make a change before we have lived a life that was not only dishonest but one that robbed us of our true self.
We look at transition as some mysterious act of life when in reality we do it all the time. Fluidly, we move through the day making adjustments to our schedules and to our day without hardly a second thought. Those are the simple transitions that we see at that moment as being necessary. Yet, we are reluctant to make the bigger transitions.  Some of us have worked almost all our lives at jobs that were not careers. We have chased job after job, all in search of a better one, when all it really came down to is that really we were searching for ourselves. We have looked for companionship and instead of waiting we launch into relationships after relationships…then it happens…we realize that the companionship that we needed first was actually within ourselves.
Trains and transitions. They both take time. The life of expediency many times is unsatisfying. Once something happens quickly, we start looking for something else to happen. We get uncomfortable with moments of development.
I remember the day that I was told by my doctors that I was healthy… a time period that saw five surgical procedures performed…and I remember sitting in my car by Cheesman Park…it came like a whisper…I am going to be ok.  There have been other struggles since then but to inwardly accept the transition that was confirmed by the doctors took time.
No longer do I hear the train. It is probably down the tracks a few miles by now. My coffee cup is now empty and “T” has moved to another location in the room.
We have no way of knowing what is on the other side of the “mountain crest” that we are travelling; however, to stop now means that we will never know.
I want so much to say something that will not just motivate you but will inspire you to simply take one step… that is what transition is…taking one step at a time. However, many times transitions unlike the train moves in silence.
Breaking script…Namaste

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