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I like to believe I am in control of the outcome.
My lie has to do with an idea that I somehow know what is best for humanity—not just my family or community but the entire world— and that by focusing on or forcing certain outcomes, I can prevent an all-out nuclear war or save the oceans along with every sea turtle and starving polar bear in them.
I like to see myself as this holy roller, a Joan-of-Arc type who will defend against and defeat evil. That I am here to destroy and prevent the collapse of it all and simultaneously bring about the collapse of it all—all the systems and structures that are no longer working as I see it in my all-knowing and all-seeing godlike vision, that my omnipotence will be the thing that saves and rescues, resurrects and revives.
I truly like to believe I am that powerful.
This lie keeps me firmly seated on my throne of feeling empowered, like a queen, but deep down, I know the truth: I am not in control of anything.
Even my body—this vessel of human flesh in which I’m ferried around daily—has a mind of its own. It breathes for me, sleeps, dreams, digests, circulates my blood, and excretes toxins and waste products from my food.
I am in control of less than one percent of all that is occurring at any given moment.
Yesterday, I recognized I was in trouble. My family experienced the loss of our matriarch, and I was struggling.
I asked my boss and my husband for what I needed, sought out the sea like those baby sea turtles we released in Zihuatanejo on our honeymoon, shepherding them as they made a break for it so maybe they’d stand a chance as the gulls swooped in to carry them off, plucked them out of the warm sand by the dozens.
I sought out the sun and the warmth of the sand at the beach, where we let ourselves lie flat on our backs with the dogs’ warm fur-covered bodies pressed up against ours, watched as the great blue whales jumped and splashed, not more than a mile offshore, great plumes of spay-like geysers, fins, and tails flapping and slapping as babies jumped up and out, all the way, alongside their breaching mothers, giant heads protruding up, then falling back into the ocean, pulled under again by the force of gravity—the same invisible force that keeps us all from floating up and into the atmosphere, drifting off like an unmoored boat into space.
We live on a Goldilocks planet they say. Conditions on Earth are so precise and perfect for life as we know it to exist. Death is not to be feared through this lens, for it is a necessary part of the Great Mystery, this dance of which we are just a small part.
Birth and death are two sides of the same coin, this currency of life, of being alive, such a rare, precious, and fleeting gift. What a joy to experience myself—here, now—to really experience with my full attention the present moment, the depth and breadth of reality, to step softly on the forest floor, each bare footfall like so many who have come before, who literally make up the soil underfoot, out of which the giant redwoods grow, tall towers like ancient sentinels, covered by spongy mosses and lichens.
To experience myself as part of this eternal oneness and nowness at any given moment is the only job I need ever concern myself with.
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