We humans are fascinating creatures. I speak as we since I generally find commonality in our human condition(ing). I realize many gurus point to the possibility of overcoming the human condition, offering a variety of titillating escape routes, but I cannot imagine how that could be. Living is living after all. It is duality roiling and boiling as the appearance of separation. How could you overcome that? It’s one thing to settle in and appreciate the ride, to stop struggling against the flow, another entirely to jump off the seat and out of the map.

Most of us try. The trying is life.

When something we don’t want to happen happens the tendency is to immediately, almost automatically, organically, seek the cause in order to find a place to shuffle the discomfort, to assign reason … and most of the time it isn’t spoken-out-loud-blame, it’s just a softly, almost subtle blame — a they (or I) must have done this blame, a tick in the column blame that keeps the whole life-is-nothing-but-uncertainty game from rolling out into the open and tipping over in shame.

What’s interesting is that whatever is happening doesn’t even have to be a big deal. It’s just the everyday every way stuff happening in the moment. We generally miss the fact that an instantaneous judgement has been made and the event called life gets slotted into a column. It’s quick, and contrary to beliefs, not painless. It’s the way we label what we don’t and can’t understand so that we trick ourselves into thinking we aren’t here standing in the dark precarious impermanence of our own lives.

We’re living it, right? If we can’t understand the whys and wherefores, no one can and that hits the ill at ease spot — no one can.

I watched a movie that tugged at my heart last night. It was filled with beautiful people and beautiful lives — a fantasy, eh — that’s what movies are, mostly. At the end I realized that I needed to forgive myself, well not really myself so much as forgiving the idea that the movies depict life as it could be … not should be … but could, that life could be other than it is, other than it was, that I could have made better choices, gone down different paths, had a different life … one more like what’s presented in the movies.

There was evidently something stuck in this beautiful little body that was a hold out from the ideas of blame, of cause and effect, of mistakes and mistaken identity. Seeing it shifted something deep within and a sob escaped, a sob trapped within scraps of the story called, I could have done it differently.

It’s a sad story, a film of right and wrong, choice and mistakes, of sadness and joy. It paints a picture that doesn’t move, trapping the characters in amber where they wait until the moment life itself sets them free, until a silly movie, or something less dramatic, creates movement, a fluctuation in the force, disentangling the trapped energy, the imprisoned benevolent magnificence of life.

The idea that I could be — should be — someone different, that I could have taken a different path, lived a different life, that this one was somehow insufficient, somehow undeserving of being lived is a common story accentuated by oh, I could have done that, I would have really enjoyed that path.

It does however discount what I was good at — failing and breaking my heart open, falling and learning how to get back up, living and evolving through the challenges this life offered.

Changing one thing would have changed everything. Change has a subtle multiplier effect. It’s the tiny pebble that twists the path to a slightly different angle. It’s not noticeable at first, but over time the aperture widens and what would have been fades into the picture of what now will never be.

I wouldn’t change a thing and yet, the human conditioning is on the look-out for better. It’s kind of fun to watch, to observe the high-jinks, to have compassion for the scrambling mind. It used to bother me, making me think I had to do something about it, that I needed to do more work on myself, that something was still wrong with me.

There was never anything wrong. I know few want to hear that and fewer still understand that to which it points. It doesn’t matter if I am cracked open or if it appears I slam shut. There is nothing right or wrong with any of the many ways I show up. They are the brilliant display, the uncertainty in form.

We are told to love ourselves, that it is the most important thing we can do, but that’s another way of saying the way we love ourselves right now isn’t good enough, that it needs improvement. Improvement happens. Deterioration, disillusionment happens. Change happens. Life is change. We have no idea where life is taking us and whether we call it life or death, good or bad, right or wrong simply changes our experience of the experience.

There is no predictable pain-free world. There is the unchanging reliability of the ever-changing, the certainty of uncertainty. It’s all Life lifeing, God Godding, This Thising … and you are That.