It Was Good

It was good
(for even just a moment)
to stand before a single tree;
To let it be this!
To let it be thus!
And to let it be Other:
To let it be the subject
of an oath, or a song,
or dirges.

I have decided to limit my posts to a few times per week, rather than every day, according to what feels right. I noticed that when I was attempting to write every single day, I began to be driven more by the egoic desire for validation of my writing and my ideas, rather than writing organically about what feels alive to me when it feels alive to me.

Besides, there is great value in going away and coming back; and there is beauty in the flowing-with. I can go away to experience a little bit of my slice of God’s becoming, and then I can report back to this blog to converse about it like a friend.

Part of being the path itself is knowing that however far you stray, you have never really left it at all. And yet I felt like I strayed from my path over the last 4 days or so.

I began to feel self-critical when I had dinner with a friend and got caught up in self-comparisons thinking about students who are at “better” universities than mine or who are “better” at my field than I am. A huge part of my personal journey is letting go of perfectionism, and this was another instance where I had to stare that problem down.

I felt for a long time an imagined pressure from others that I ought to know everything. This comes from my childhood, when it was my social identity to be the “smartest person in the room” at all times. This is a very hard identity to shake, and it causes me a lot of suffering. It also causes me to perform below my potential, because it leads to anxiety that leads to procrastination.

Since I realized this problem, I have been letting this existential fear play itself out in the light of awareness, and now for the most part I no longer feel the need to prove my intelligence to myself.

In some ways, I have proven that by normal standards I am intelligent. On the other hand, by those same standards I am not the most intelligent. I am certainly not the most knowledgeable. If I look at that in an all-or-nothing way, it can produce existential anxiety for me. Sometimes this still crops up, as it did the other day.

And yet, coming off of an experience of self-criticism like that, I see that I can have faith that even that apparent straying itself was willed for a reason, and I can look to discern what that reason is. Perhaps it is to realize, even as I’m writing this, that my own sufferings have unlocked a new world of thought and self-expression to me, which I can now share with others.

I have a lot more to write about perfectionism and how I have learned to live with it, but that will have to wait for another day.

Anyway, I am excited to announce that I have been asked to be a guest on a podcast! The hosts are excited about my treatise and poetry. Details about that episode are forthcoming.

As always, thanks for reading!