Gazing directly into the eye of the phone camera, I pause for the cajillionth selfie of my life. Worn weary by decades of self-examination, the self finds new ways of renewing and reviewing its existence if we allow it room to grow. Humans get rootbound too, and so many of us are afraid of potting up (people often being averse to great change, particularly in their accustomed environments). I’ve usually welcomed the opportunity to grow and expand, to take the shoes and confining belt off at the end of the day, to spill messily into the next stage of life when we don’t know quite exactly where we’re headed. It’s taken me years to reach this state of relative ease, and countless days of meditation and practice to start being even slightly ok with it, but I’m much more accepting of this imperfect mess of life – a mess we should learn to love, especially with all our mistakes and missteps.
There’s a certain freedom in being so open and honest about where we are and what we are feeling, especially when it’s an acknowledgment that things are less than perfect, that we have failed in some areas, that we didn’t rise to our best at a certain moment. That’s sometimes the key to moving forward – not getting hung up on the messiness of life. For so much of my existence I’ve wanted to avoid, prevent, or clean it up, when all that time getting into the muck might have been the best way of moving through the muck.
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