I was reminded today of how much I enjoy the stillness and the silence and the
spacing between busyness and this is really funny because for most of my life I was
an adrenaline junkie so skydiving and bungee jumping and rock climbing and even when
I married Yusami I was still going out every week putting my life on the line rock
climbing and doing dangerous things And that was kind of part of my identity,
part of what I thought was creating joy in my life. But today, as I laid in bed,
I woke up and were in this space in between. I was just appreciating the moment so
much. I feel so good just lying here in bed. There's nothing I need to get up for
and do immediately. There's nothing that has my attention or is pulling on my mind.
We're getting ready to get on a plane in the evening and go off to a conference.
I've been busy for the last couple weeks, really preparing for the conference and
spending a lot of time and organizing my thoughts and putting them down into slides
and so on. And suddenly I just appreciated, "Ah, here's the space in between,
all the busy preparation time, and then all the busy action that'll happen when I
arrive at the conference in a few days. But today, in this moment, I'm just here.
Just breathing, enjoying, laying in bed, I'm warm, I'm comfortable,
I'm completely fulfilled and happy. And it just reminded me how easy it is to miss
that time when the material mind gets active, so when there's something I have to
do, of course I ramp up and do those things, and I set aside the moments,
the beautiful moments, to focus on these supposedly important things that I need to
do. And well, I can say that I am happy that I'm able to organize my thoughts and
create things and make a presentation or a class that people enjoy and learn from,
I'm really happy that I'm able to do that. It's the time after that happens that I
actually look forward to. It reminds me a little bit of when I first did a bungee
jumping was back in 1990, actually, in the first bungee jumping site in the U .S.,
and somebody said something really interesting to me. They said, "The fun is not in
the jump. The fun is in having jumped. So afterwards being able to say,
"I went bungee jumping and I've got a photo or a video," and I thought, "Oh, this
is this is really true for me still." The fun of speaking on stage isn't the
actual event. The part that I actually look forward to is having done it. I look
forward to the time when it's complete, we have a recording that we can use, people
were entertained and things went well, and the job is complete. That's what I look
forward to. He saw me brought this to my attention years ago, when I was teaching
classes every week in Tokyo, and had been for many years, and she asked me, and
she said, "How many times have you looked forward to getting up in front of a
group and speaking? Because, you know, I've been doing it for ten years, this is my
career, and I looked back, and I thought about it, and I said, "None." And she
said, "Yeah, that's right. Did you know that?" "No, I didn't know that.
I thought this is something I really enjoyed and, you know, it was part of my goal
to be doing this." And she said, "Yeah, I can see in your energy that your brain
wants to do that. Your brain wants to be a person who does that. But your soul
and your body prefer the silence, prefer the more gentle kind of life without being
in the spotlight or being in the adrenaline rush of all that. And it's funny,
it just came back to me today as I was laying there in bed and feeling that
moment and I'd looked over and saw me and I was telling her how I felt and I
could see she really lit up and she felt really happy too because she's been
waiting for me for so many years to naturally be in that same vibration as her of
being in a space of spirit mind living where every moment is full,
everything is beautiful. There isn't something I have to do to create a beautiful
life. I can just recognize that the life I'm living right now in this moment is
beautiful. And so many times, especially in the last few weeks or months, I've been
so busy and I have noticed He saw me as they're waiting to connect with me,
wanting to connect with me, but I'm really not available because I'm busy. My mind
is busy. I've got these tasks I have to perform, and I was so happy today that
that faded away and just naturally I found the space in between where we could
connect and be in that space of spirit mind together.
