Fill The Unrelenting Minutes…

In recent weeks I have been revisiting my past in a most peculiar way. Unbidden, and without provocation, the people, events, places, and experiences of my past happen into my memory like a long played out life review. Sometimes just before I fall asleep, sometimes in the pool, sometimes in a dream…just like Ebenezer Scrooge I have the ghosts of relationships past coming to catalog, dialogue, and categorize themselves to me…and requiring of me that I see them, me, and my story about them, anew.

A friend at the dog park tells me that it is because I have too much time on my hands. Lord knows there are so few distractions in my life-what with no work and all-that I understand now, in a way I never have before, the “tyranny of time” that is often referenced by the poetic among us.

My Teacher once said it is our responsibility to “fill the unrelenting minutes, with sixty seconds of distance run.” …To be equal to the task of the minutes we are allotted requires the end of distractions of all kinds. The minutes-they are unrelenting-when faced squarely, and without distraction, yet it is the only way to assure that some measure of distance has in fact been run. We all know someone, who no matter how many years may have passed in their lives they behave toward others, themselves, and situations, like self-indulgent children. These are those among us, who have filled up all of those unrelenting minutes with minutia, and thus have traveled no distance at all. Sadly, they will die children…still searching for a mother’s love or a father’s pride, until the very end.

I have come to see that a Spiritual Path of real value is one that empties you out…not one that fills you up. A path that opens you to the requirement of distance covered, wisdom achieved, and the flame of self-understanding lit and burning. In my youth and ignorance, I would pray for all the things I wanted, or thought I needed. Give me, give me, give me could have been the refrain for all the many bounties I wanted the Lord to provide. Money, fame, recognition, attention, acceptance….give me, give me, give me.

I look back now and am astonished by the selfishness, self-centeredness, and sheer childishness of such pitiful requests. Especially, taking into account that all of the most important of these requests cannot be had from without, but must come from a change in relationship to the self and a deeper understanding of life, and my role in that life.

I, like you, were taught to believe that the highest stature that we could achieve, in our culture, was the achievement of becoming special in some way. We need only look at the lives of celebrities, to understand how potentially ruinous, the achievement of specialness can become. Only the powerfully grounded can attain wild success and not have it totally destroy them.

I once achieved a mild form of fame, working as an associate minister in a church in California. My lectures soon grew to fill our auditorium to overflow capacity; people sat in the aisles and on the stairs and stood in the foyer. After services they wanted my time, attention, and to praise me for my “life altering” words. I remember at the time being, (to use a British term that seems to fit), gob smacked by the whole experience.

I felt a mild, (and sometimes-not so mild) form of shame, not guilt…but shame, about the whole affair. I went to the Senior Minister to ask for her guidance and she rebuffed my confusion with a somewhat brisk response that she had no counsel for my complaints, and she made it fairly clear that she couldn’t understand exactly what it was I was complaining about anyway. I couldn’t either, then.

That was thirteen years ago, it has taken me all this time to understand how lucky I was, not to get trapped in my small moment of fame and success.

I will try to illuminate what I have discovered, with regard to the achievement of “specialness”…

Our culture inbreeds us with a value system that has at its foundation a divisive substructure. A one-to-ten kind of measurement of value, best to worst, bottom to top, a linear evaluation resulting in our quality and worth being measured on a scale. For instance, if you are a card carrying, clipboard wielding, pocket protector wearing, geek…you will no doubt show up as a lowly “one” on a scale of ten in the athletic world. Here, you are so far down the scale as to be almost invisible…and, on the other end… the Golf Pros, Olympians, NBA, and Pro football players.

You no doubt, are thinking…”well sure, that’s how it is supposed to be”. If you are thinking that, then you have missed the painful deficits that a linear scale of valuation brings to the party. Let’s say you are the-just-graduated-local-High-School Prom King or Queen, pretty as a peach, popular as a summer shower on a sun scorched day…in your small town, you are the definitive Ten. Now you go off to college in some major city up north-built up by your years of being applauded and appreciated-you discover that in this new much larger pond, you are only a four, or maybe on a good day a five.

It is a crushing and painful discovery to have tumbled so far so fast. Even the pro athletes will one day no longer matter to the scale of one to ten. Their bodies will age, reflexes slow down, speed decreases, agility wanes…and suddenly they are put out to pasture, no longer the shining example of the “best of the best”. All because we measure everything on this unforgiveable scale of worst to best, or more accurately, plain-old-ordinary to oh-my-god-special.

My small experience with fame exposed me, very radically, to this imaginary scale dreamed up by-who-knows-who, eons ago. It exposed my unconscious desire to be “special”. My Soul knew the danger I faced and sent me messages thru the emotion of shame, to try and divert me from becoming lost, in the maze of beings set apart, as no longer ordinary.

Here, I feel the need to insert a moments worth of consideration of the differences between “special” and excellence. Excellence is the commitment and application of the truest self, a sort of focus that drives one deeper and deeper into a set of skills, innate tendencies and talents, that finally result in a harmony of flow, a synthesis of the talented with the world’s need for that talent. Excellence is a bringing forth…specialness is conferred from without, and that difference is the difference between night and day, distances so vast as to be almost uncrossable. Excellence is born of the soul’s essence in a given lifetime; specialness is the false and temporary light of conferred fame.

The depth of excellence provides us the connection to source that will allow, as the theologian Frederick Buechner puts it, for us to reach that place where, “our deep sadness and the world’s deep hunger meet”, here we may find the path that leads to our becoming a small part of the advancing saga of human spiritual development.

To return to our study of the harrowing aspects of the one-to-ten scale, contrast the damages of the linear system with a circular one. Draw an imaginary line in your mind, and next to it, a circular one…here, if you are willing, you will come to see why being “special” is so horribly dangerous. As we have already seen, that line is problematic…because just as surely as you are a ten in your small town high school, you will be a five or below in the larger world of an upscale college. So the safety, security, love, and appreciation we can easily spend a lifetime seeking, has no stability of any kind, if we are living on the linear scale of worst to best.

Enter the life-giving circle.

Here, you can no longer be judged on a worst to best scale. A circle has no room in it for best or worst, how could it have? Merely, points of position or degrees, around the circles perimeter…here, you are safe from the tyranny of best and worst. But, and it’s a big but, you have to be willing to give up competition to join the circle’s community. Most humans wouldn’t even consider giving up competition. Those few moments of standing on the number ten platform, medal hung about the neck, are enough to keep most of us striving on the slippery slope of linear thinking for all the days of our lives.

Me, I chose the circle, right after my small brush with fame. Intuitively, I knew shame should not be part of any kind of authentic success. I couldn’t have understood then… I’ve only, just now, begun to understand the depth, value, beauty, and redemption of moving from line to circle.

In a Soul’s progression moving from line back to circle, is a tremendous life altering experience. But there is even more…

Once aware of the beauty and serenity of the circle, one can begin the movement away from the perimeter of the circle to its hub or center. To choose the circle over the line, ends the first level of judgment that so poisons are lives and progress. If I am not better than you, or worse than you, as the line would have me believe-then I have begun the process of ridding myself of the Soul numbing desire for “specialness”. But if I stay stuck in my one seat, or position on the circle soon I will begin to see those who share my point of view, those on either side of me closest to my perspective, as friends…and those directly opposite me on the circle as enemies.

Go back to imagining that circle. Here you are on your point or degree of perspective…and let’s say you are a Muslim, as you gaze directly across the circle you see a Christian and an “infidel”…or maybe you are the Christian and you see a suicide bomber. If you allow yourself to become wedded to your the place on the circle you were born into, then all Soul gains achieved from moving from line back to circle will be lost. (Line thinking is a kind of self induced hypnosis, devised, developed, and fostered by a cultural process designed to set up justifications for everything from "being a winner at all cost" to race genocide. Whereas your position/perspective in the circle is something you are born into, having been provided by your family and heritage.)

We must leave behind our most cherished perspectives to move alone and committed to the center of the circle, here at the hub, all perspectives are seen to be valid, all are welcome….each is home. A gentleness, kindness, and perhaps the meekness, the Bible promises will one day inherit the earth, is achieved only by those who are willing to move to the center of the circle…giving up all claims to self righteousness and self enhancement.

I, personally, have not yet left the outer perimeter. I know this because of the experience of judgment, that still washes over me from time to time. I no longer seek, or yearn, or envy, or feel jealous of others…those states of mind have long ago let go of me. For the most part, I no longer lay claim to the truth, or to being right. I understand that right or wrong, like best or worst, are a line form of thinking…something I am so grateful to have let go of. As to the truth, only the most noble and humble among us have seen the “truth”. So I will leave the truth to beings much more expanded than myself.

Now I see the judgment left in my heart, in the day to day business of life. I encounter the loud overbearing man who needs so desperately to be acknowledged, that he forces his way into my field of vision, laying claim to my time and attention because he is lonely and lost…and instead of finding the grace in myself, that would allow kindness to meet his neediness, instead I resist him and resent the attention he demands of me. This is how I know I am still stuck in the outer circle. If I weren’t, I would answer this mans sense of entitlement with non-judgmental silence and stillness of soul, rather than resentment and resistance.

I am the only one alive, who can fill my “unrelenting minutes with sixty seconds of distance run”. There are days, when I can see the distance traveled…and days, when I feel no distance at all has been achieved. But, at the very least…I am certain of the track I am traveling on. Long, long, gone is the need for measuring myself by some arbitrary, made up, illusory, linear scale of achievement.

And in it’s place, the clarity and self-mastery of moving closer to the center of the circle.

Until Tomorrow….

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

Fill The Unrelenting Minutes…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission. If you wish to contact the author you may do so at ronnidmiller@aol.com