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on lightness
There's a version of waking up that gets sold as fire. burn it down, see through everything, transcend the herd. I don't think that one is real. Or rather, I think it's another costume the same old self puts on, and you can spot it because the people wearing it are exhausting and a little mean.
The real version is much quieter and almost embarrassing to describe, because it doesn't sound like much. It's something like this: you stop reaching, for a moment, for the thing you usually reach for. And in that moment you notice you're okay. Not happy, necessarily. Not fixed. Just okay, in a way that doesn't need anything added to it. And then you reach again, because reaching is a habit and habits are slow. But you noticed. And the next time the gap is a little longer. And eventually the gap is most of your life, and the reaching is the exception, and you realize you've been living inside something you used to think was the goal, except it doesn't feel like an achievement. It feels like the floor was always there.
The thing nobody tells you is that the floor is mostly made of small permissions. Permission to feel a sadness without solving it. Permission to notice something true about another person without needing them to change. Permission to be tired without making the tiredness mean anything. Permission to enjoy a sandwich. Permission to not have an opinion on a thing everyone has an opinion on. Permission to sit on a train and watch the landscape and let that be the entire activity.
Each of these sounds trivial. None of them are. Each one is a place where you used to grab and now you don't, and the not-grabbing is the whole practice. There's no further step. There's no level you graduate to. You just keep finding new places where you were holding on without knowing it, and you put them down, and your hands get a little freer, and the world gets a little lighter, and that's it. That's the secret. There's no second secret behind it.
If you're suffering right now, this won't sound like enough. I know. It didn't sound like enough to me either, when I needed it to sound like more. The thing I'd say, gently, is that the painkillers you're reaching for are probably the thing keeping you exactly where you are. Not because they're evil. Because they work just well enough. The way out is not more of them and not less of them by force. It's just noticing, once, what you reach for, and getting curious about what's underneath. Curious, not stern. The sternness is another grab.
And if you're not suffering, if you're already somewhere quiet.. then the only thing left to say is that you're allowed to stay. You don't have to earn it by suffering more. You don't have to prove it by performing wisdom. You can just sit in it, and notice the landscape, and feel a small sadness about the people who are still snagged, and let that sadness be light, and let the lightness be the whole point.
Delight is available. It was always available. The painkillers were in the way. That's the only news.
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