A Smooth Path

My 182 mile walk on the Colorado trail taught me many lessons.  One of these lessons was that there will never be a day when everything goes right.  As I was walking along, I found myself often thinking “if only my hips didn’t hurt, this day would be perfect.”  The next day I thought “if only these blisters on my heels didn’t hurt, this day would be perfect.”  In the evening I thought “if only it wasn’t raining, this evening would be perfect.”  Each day there was something else on my list of problems that kept me from having the perfect day.  What I failed to realize is that all of these little imperfections are what were making my experience so powerful and real.  Pema Chodron explains this perfectly by saying; “From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience.  There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.  To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.  To live fully is to be always in no-man’s land, to experience every moment as completely new and fresh.”  Wanting our lives to have no difficulty is literally asking to no longer live the human experience.  Life will never be perfect no matter how hard we work or how many ducks we place in a row.  Being alive means being fully present for the difficult as well as for the enjoyable moments.  It means holding the difficulty in your arms and embracing it for it is evidence that you are truly alive.