Day 10. When play becomes work.

I got out to the reservoir at 5:15 this morning, rode a lap on my bike—on my mat at 5:30.  I was planning to be home at 6 so that my wife Jen could head to work.  The clock was ticking.  I only had 30 minutes to get what I came here for.   I breathed, I moved, I danced, I shook, I relaxed, I breathed.  I did all the things I had done in previous mornings to induce the words of insight that I could then share with myself, and with you, the reader.  It wasn’t working this time.  No words, no insights, no wisdom.

Uh oh.

What was I going to write?  What was I going to say this morning in my blog?  Was this the beginning of the end?  Just a fun little experiment that is now over?  My thoughts began to swirl, “What can I do?  What can I do to generate the insights and capture the words?  There must be SOMETHING I can DO.”

That’s when I realized…I had lost sight of my true purpose for being out there this morning, the same purpose for being out there every morning.  I had forgotten my burning desire which had caused me to greet the sun each morning for the past 10 days.  Not blogging.  Being. 

It is the experience of slowing down, of relaxing, of greeting the sun as it gently caresses our world with its golden warmth, of watching the birds awake and tidy up the messes of gnats and flies that have begun to swarm that has drawn me to the reservoir each morning.  As I watch the world come alive I realize how alive the world is.  I realize how alive I am.  I realize that the world and I are part of the same aliveness.  We are alive together.  All of it, all of us.  Aliveness is our common thread, it is our shared experience.  By greeting the morning in this way I realize my kinship with all things.  None of it is off-limits, none of it is out of my reach.  It is all mine, it is all ours.  It is all me, it is all us.  There is only one us, there is only one of us.  There is only me.

I began this morning worrying.  My worrying caused me to turn something I really enjoy into “work” that I “had to do or else”.  This gave me a deadline, causing even more anxiety around the possibility that I might miss that deadline.  If didn’t have my words by 6, oh well, I’m finished.  The words were my primary objective.  This was the story I had created.  And in this story I had forgotten what it was that was generating my words in the first place: the amazing joy of greeting the morning, greeting myself as part of this morning, and wanting to share this joy with everyone.  Sure, the blogging is fun, but blogging is the happy after-effect, not the logical forethought to greeting the morning.  All things flow from choosing JOY first.

And would you look at that, WORDS!!   8)