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So … I was sitting there, letting go of the junk that had been internalized, and as I listened closer to the silence of omnipresence it came to me rather gently:

“Anything that we avoid only creates bigger challenges later on.” 

This gentle nudge led my contemplation to a quick overview of how I have lived with a passive aggressive tendency to allow little annoyances or judgmental criticisms to pile up in my romantic relationships to the point of “I can’t deal with this anymore”, then bail. My moon is in cancer, but my sun sign is Aries … so … this behavioral limitation makes sense on some level. Yet, it’s destructive. 

Then it started to resound a bit louder.

I looked at my current unemployment. Then I took another long look at the traumatic breakup that has me in a long distance relationship with my daughter. Next I took a quick glance at my educational debt.  All of a sudden what began as a gentle nudge came closer to the surface of awareness to quake and reverberate. 

 Then the truth settled in:

“You can only avoid things for so long before they catch up to you.” 

The great Bob Marley sang about this way: 

Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running
And ya running away.
Ya running and ya running,
But ya can’t run away from yourself
Can’t run away from yourself 
Can’t run away from yourself 
Can’t run away from yourself 
Can’t run away from yourself 

Can’t run away from yourself.

Sometimes we only wake up to the reality of our self-saboteur when the wrecking ball of our unconscious comes swinging like Mike Tyson and lands us flat on our face. We do get up eventually. 

This is important, and its importance cannot be understated. We have to be willing to face those aspects of ourselves that for so long we have avoided and allowed to exist on their own in the shadows of our consciousness. We are not free until we integrate that which lives in the dark … with the light of awareness. 

Yet, as you know … this is not a personal issue. These things exist in, as, our interpersonal relationships and on a much larger scale, in and as our social matrix. Historically, we have refused to truly deal with how the divisive realities of sexism, classism, hetero-normative conflation, racism, ableism, etc. have been deeply conditioned within our cultural, familial and personal psyche. What does that wrecking ball look like on a cultural level? The great depression seems to be an apt metaphor, myth and historical reference. 

Anyway … avoidance. I was looking at this word … avoid. A-void. In the online etymology library we learn that the word avoid first came from the “c.1300, from Anglo-French avoider ‘to clear out, withdraw (oneself),’ partially anglicized from Old French esvuidier ‘to empty out,’ from es- ‘out’ (see ex-) + vuidier ‘to be empty,’ from voide ’empty, vast, wide, hollow, waste’. This original meaning is what I think that we want to be practicing on a regular basis. It is particularly important to be able to empty ourselves of the crap that we accumulate in the day-to-day routine of living. It wasn’t until the 1520’s that the word avoid took on the meaning “to escape, to evade.” 

As a final thought, could it be that being a victim sometimes means that we are addicted to the story of our own personal oppression? Could it further mean that evading to be void of these stories gives us meaning? Then further still, that to be void of that can be scary because we are so identified with them? 

Anyway, this is just a little birdie that flew into my awareness during my sit this morning. I’m off to keep looking and listening to see how it further educates me. 

Peace.