On Being ‘Here’

I come here when I feel afraid of the cost of being true to myself. Being here is my happy place. It replenishes me for the journey.

It is a state of mind that changes everything else. Its existence is more about what it means to me and the doors in my mind that it opens, otherwise it could be just another moment that passes by without conscious awareness. Things are only relevant in terms of what they mean to us, and on their own they don’t have any real importance.

But it drives me. It makes me get up the morning. It makes me take all kinds of risks. It makes me speak the truth.

It makes me work for no reason other than love.

It isn’t  easy but the alternative of not being true to myself is worse. The numbness, the emptiness, the sheer torture of not being real isn’t worth it.

When I was 10 years old, my most pressing issue was, ‘Ammi, why am I me and not you?”, “how come I am here, who am I?”

My mother, bless her, would try to answer and then give up…I’d follow her around the house. I didn’t like school because they didn’t talk to the kids as if we mattered, so I’d get sick and stay home. One day I said that some things have no endings and no beginnings. My sister and mother  laughed. They told my father and my father looked up from his book and said, ‘she is right……tell me, chicken and egg, what came first?’

Being a female  wanna be metaphysical philosopher wasn’t easy. You still had to be a girl. Being a girl was often about being pretty and I enjoyed fashion, but things change and the cost of being real is that one changes.

I now think fashion is a waste of my time–I love beauty still, but  time is so precious because my dream is so huge and not for one life time but for perhaps dozens or hundreds of lifetimes. I want to spend every minute in service to living in abundance.. A new Earth where human beings live in harmony with nature and consequently each other.

When I visit Pakistan, my sister and mother both turn to me for advice on fashion. Oops. I have no idea anymore how to embelish myself to be more pleasing. Isn’t being clean enough? aren’t I beautiful already?

The last time I was there, my sister’s big eyes looked at me, ” but you were the fashionable one, what happened to you?”

I don’t know. Or wait, I do know. I realized that we all have to go one day, and I had to pick that which was truly important to me and do that, rather than waste my time in stuff that had no potential of giving me real happiness.

What happened to me was that I took every opportunity to search for happiness.  Choosing this, meant giving up stuff that wasn’t relevant or I had no resources left over for it. yet, I wanted this vagabond life, rather than the life of bloat and perpetual discontentedness. Meditation isn’t a money making business, it is the business of caring for other people enough to sit with them through the hard job of becoming real and being paid for that soul centred service rather than exploiting people’s needs (which is what many businesses are about).

Meditation made life simple for me in other ways. If I have a cold I usually don’t take medication. If I need a dental job, I don’t take anaesthesia, instead I simply talk to my nerves. People may be unaware of it, but hypnosis was used for operations, before the chemical type intervention of anaesthesia and it totally works. Our mind is very powerful indeed and we are barely recognizing who we are. Our potential as human beings is vast and largely untapped.

My happy place is in communion with myself. I get happy, sillily happy, seriously child like happy when I am alone….and by alone I mean when there is no thought of others, what people think, don’t think, what I should do!. The space in my mind is (to me) worth billions of dollars and the space under my feet is a necessary cost to care for the body. Maybe a day will come when our currency, our medium of exchange will recognize this reality and make the stuff that we need for the body a basic right, rather than a purpose of life itself.

This ‘space’ i..e, being ‘here’ is all I have and I think that’s true for everyone–the space in the head makes life worth living…and when we lose that space, life becomes heavy and miserable.

As time passed, and I came to realize this more and more, I needed less and less from life and what was valuable to me was so simple that I questioned all the things I used to surround myself with. I didn’t miss anything instead, I felt free…it meant I had more time to think, dream and create beauty.

Life is about pursuing happiness and joy. Happiness is our right and it is a gift that’s given for no reason, it is within our souls, like an implanted microchip:) that beeps when we find our happy place. We must follow that spark of joy and let it take us where it will, because that’s our destiny.

I relate to simple peasants more than the urban angst ridden ‘professionals’ and the depression of  industrial discontent, which we have wired into our children, telling them they are not enough unless they do this or that. We tell them in so many ways that, ‘It is not ok unless we have the latest or best in life or you are the best and smartest.” We tell them life is horrible and tough. Then we wonder why our children don’t talk to us.

On the other hand, the life of people who live close to the soil  is spent close to nature and most of it is about just ‘being.’ I remember my time in Sindh’s villages with such fondness. Not because my other friends in urban areas weren’t awesome, but because the people in the village were more happy. They were here, because their lives were simpler.

A day goes by so quickly. What is the point of this great blessing of a life, if all we can do with it is worry?

Being Here is the only place we can ever truly be.