Self As Unfolding Event

Someone led to me to see, recently, in a special way for the first time, how I didn’t choose to be alive.  How I am an effect of a cause, and that cause was the effect of other causes.  And since coming into being, I have been causing many effects that then part from me, go on their own way, and continue in a mysterious unfolding, flowering, latticework to make other effects that lead to other causes, and so on.

It is a bit like weather, I think.

I find it often helpful — centering, calming and lightening — to think of people as natural events, like the weather.

An ocean current, an atmospheric current.  Ineffable movements, sometimes thousands of miles away.  The sea floor.  The play of shores, the placement and angles of mountains, inland storms.  All of this collects in a way impossible to sort out and forms a cloud, a series of clouds, a storm system, and then I receive a series of cold, rainy days in the high desert in August.

And then the clouds move on.  And things change again.

The clouds didn’t choose to be there, the storm didn’t decide.  It just became.  And while the clouds were, they were constantly changing, flowing under far and near influences and affecting everything they neared, in one way or another.  Bringing shadow, bringing life-source water and sometimes perhaps bringing harm.  And this is okay.  It’s part of the meaningful surprise of being.  In which we are part of so much that is beyond our control but that still impacts us.  In which we are all part of the same song — a note, an instrument.  We cause effects.  We effect one another.  

In a symphony the flutist takes care of her own part.  She practices her own part, she focuses on her own instrument.  Same with the cellist and the pianist and the tubist.  They don’t call themselves symphonists.  They call themselves cellists and pianists and flutists.  Yet they’re still aware that they create a symphony, aware that their gifts are part of something larger.  And the best and, in fact, the only way for them to have a meaningful impact on the whole symphony is by tending to their own special expressions.

In such a way is life.  Harmony is impossible without many different sounds coming together.  Harmony cannot be made with one sound.  Harmony is everything working for itself but unfolding together.  This creates the mysterious dynamic equipoise that is existence in our world.

I have often been afraid to be real.  Afraid to want, to love, to express myself.  Because I was afraid to have an impact on others, to create unforeseeable effects, to have an influence on out there that would then spin forever across the universe.  Sometimes probably causing harm, though sometimes surely creating space for magic.

To be a cause causing effects can seem like an overwhelming responsibility at times, but it’s actually our most beautiful and foundational attribute.  It is what life is, what it means to be present, to be living.  To cause effects is perhaps our most important role, because we are all part of this unfolding, we are part of the inscrutable workings that make everything happen. 

I think the best thing we can do for ourselves and for everyone and everything else is to be true to ourselves and express our natures authentically.  As true and authentic as a tree or a crow or a bumblebee.  We are an effect unfolding organically in the universe. 

Each of us is, in fact, the universe itself unfolding. 

And like a cloud, sometimes we will cause relief, sometimes frustration, sometimes we will save lives, and sometimes we will threaten them.  But like a cloud, we are right and beautiful and necessary.  We belong to this world.  Perhaps we can trust ourselves more than we’re taught.