I tell you, it seems like most of my life, I have waited for “this part” to be finally over so I can just move on to other good things. Like when I was in the University. I hated it so much! Life seemed impossibly hard. My classes were difficult to understand and quite honestly, I was disinterested in most of my courses because I was more focused on making ends meet(in my immediate situation) than learning about lipids and “the anastomosis of the heart”. Oh, I hated exam season too, particularly because I had a lecturer who wanted to be bribed before he’d let anyone pass his exams. Yes, true story! It was kind of the small corruption that captured the larger indignity of my whole experience. I was not financially buoyant. My parents were struggling to make ends meet, and meanwhile, my own ends couldn’t even meet anything! Not to talk about having three meals a day. I know this does sound like the beginning of one of those grass-to-grace stories. I don’t even intend for it to be that way(and there’s no success story on this one). But what I am saying is I was broke, hated school, no longer cared to be a medical doctor, and to make matters worse, I schooled in Northern Nigeria, which was an incredibly humid, dry, and hot location compared to where I grew up. So even the physical experience of being in school was so darn frustrating. My gosh! I just wanted to finish, get my degree, and finally start to work and make my own living. That was the finish line! Everything beyond it was where real life would start. No? I just wanted to leave and finally make real money and be an adult!

Nobody told me!

Well, nobody told me. Nobody told me that this would be yet another spiral. “When I get a job, I will finally breathe!” “Oh, when I get a better-paying job, I will finally be happy.” “When I move to a better city, then I’ll feel alive.” “When the political climate shifts, then I’ll relax into the life I’ve been meaning to live.”

My goal post has shifted again because when I retire and finally own that plot of land with two cute donkeys, three goats, and egg-laying chickens, then, then, I will finally have arrived.

To be honest, a part of me still does this. A part of me can’t wait to be retired, cash out on my 401k, sip pina colada from the rewards of past investments, chil on my four-acre plot of land with all the donkeys, chickens, and goats I can enjoy tending. And more realistically, my mind finds comfort in hoping that the political climate changes because perhaps then there would be a beautiful conclusion for me, and I would finally stop living in this limbo and enjoy the life I’ve been wanting to enjoy.

But I’m not bamboozled. Not anymore. I know exactly how this plays out. There will always be yet another thing waiting for me to finally conquer once I escape this particular reality. Interestingly, coincidentally, all the mystics have been here, seen it, seen through it, and they’ve been hinting at this since like forever.

Lessons from Mystics of old

I was shocked and inspired when I read about St. John of the Cross, who spent years in a prison cell, literally a closet, beaten once a week, starved, humiliated by his own religious brothers. Yet he didn’t write his most luminous poetry after the cell. He wrote the poems that we so enjoy reading during. He didn’t wait for the suffering to end before touching something …eternal. The dark night was literally his terrain.

Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic, once said something that still rattles me: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is ‘thank you,’ it will be enough.” Not thank you for the life I’m going to have. Not thank you for when things finally shift. More like…thank you for even this. Isn’t that outrageous if you think about this? Or if you’re in a funk, how can you really relate to this?

The Desert Mothers and Fathers, one of them, Abba Moses, when asked for advice by a young monk, simply said: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Not go find a better cell. Not wait until the conditions improve. Sit. Here. Now. And let this be the teacher.

Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching(Chapters 6 and 28) pointed to the same thing: the valley doesn’t become fertile by climbing upward. It receives everything precisely because it stays low. The Tao doesn’t hurry, and yet everything is accomplished.

It so happens that while I recognize the internal movement …the reaching, the leaning toward some future where things will finally be arranged in my favor, there is a growing recognition. A slow, almost reluctant, clear seeing. This path... where I am... is the only way. It is literally the only place I can be and the only place I need to be.

Of course, with this kind of leaning, we are bound to question: is this some form of resignation? A giving up without trying? A spiritual bypassing dressed in contemplative spiritual garbage talk? Well, in this clear seeing, I tell you what: There is a weird, might I say, psychotic—acceptance that where we are is exactly where we need to be. And that acceptance, when it is full, comes with a strange enjoyment. Not enjoyment like pleasure or entertainment. More like the enjoyment of a river that has finally stopped fighting its own current. The enjoyment of my weight, your weight resting fully on the ground.

Brother Lawrence, the 17th-century Carmelite monk, spent decades washing dishes and repairing sandals in a monastery kitchen. He wasn’t waiting for a more spiritual assignment. Or like the prosperity gospel disease of evangelical circles, he wasn’t waiting for someday God blessing him with plenty of money. He(as the books about him now calls it) practiced “the presence of God” among the pots and pans. He wrote: “The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer.” I bet you, he didnt’ have some superhuman equanimity. He just stopped making the distinction between where God was supposed to be and where God actually was, which, for him was right there, in the greasy water, in the worn leather. Oh, I think he even suffered severe pains late into his life.

Ramana Maharshi was once asked by a devotee: “How long will it take to reach Self-realization?” He replied: “Self-realization is not something to be gained. It is already there. All that is needed is to get rid of the thought ‘I have not realized.’” In other words: you’re not on the way to the way. You’re in it. This way—with all its mess, all its discomfort, all its unresolved spirals—is the way.

I am no longer bamboozled

Yeah, I am no longer bamboozled waiting for ‘good times’. Unfortunately Fortunately, the spiral doesn’t stop. The next thing I’m waiting for will arrive, and right behind that one too, is another waiting. What shifts for me now is not the circumstances, situations and scenarios I am in. What shifts for me is the relationship to where I stand. And somehow, this shift is also in the body, in the breath, in the way I stand, the recognition of the ground I stand on. That ground is the only thing that’s real. And in that realness, I am fully carried.

Ah! It’s just this very moment. Totally complete.

Contemplative Prompts

* What are you currently enduring that you’ve been treating as a hallway to somewhere better? What if the only thing you can change internally is the orientation you have. So instead of a hallway, could it be a room you were meant to inhabit?

* Where in your life are you postponing enjoyment, presence, or peace until a condition is met? What does that postponement cost you today?

* Sit with Abba Moses’ phrase: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” What is your “cell” right now? What might it be trying to teach you that you’ve been too restless to hear?

* Can you recall a time when something you desperately wanted to escape became, in retrospect, the very thing that shaped you most deeply? What does that suggest about where you are now?

* What would it feel like, not as an idea but in your body, to stop leaning forward? To let your full weight rest on this moment, this ground, this life as it is?

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