Can't sleep

 It's 2:40am. We have a 7:45 flight to Houston. My alarm is set for 3:50am but I can't sleep. Call it nerves. Any time we travel somewhere for vacation, I get a little nervous. Especially with flying. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's the idea of leaving a normal routine for something different. Maybe it's the thought of a giant metal tube hurling me 30,000 feet above the ground. That's probably it.

Insomnia is a funny thing. I get it a lot when I have deadlines to meet. My mind can't find a place of rest. And the more I tell myself to try and fall asleep, the more elusive it becomes.

I've learned to just go with it. Accept the fact that I had planned on getting more sleep, but it's just not going to happen. Rather than get frustrated, make the most of the situation.

Acceptance is something I often think about. My church upbringing taught me that the world is not what it's supposed to be and needs saving. My work tells me i need to operate with a sense of urgency to beat competition. Even with this blog, I have the goal of maximizing health. Very few places advocate and teach acceptance.

I came across a video yesterday on the difference between judgment and acceptance in the context of spiritual growth or evolution. The speaker, Kerry K, said just like physical life changes and grows in complexity through biological evolution, spiritual life changes and grows through spiritual evolution.

Kerry states that all we need to do to grow spiritually is to practice radical acceptance. Don't worry about getting past the negative aspects of your life. Learn to love everything about yourself just as it is.

And this is where I experience tension. There's a constant push in our culture to be the best we can be through a lot of hard work. So how can we simultaneously accept things as they are while at the same time wanting things to improve?

Maybe the answer is to accept the tension. Like strings on a guitar, in order to make music there has to be tension. But just the right amount of tension. Too much and we'll be sharp. Too little and we'll be flat.

How do we know what's enough tension? This is something I'll ponder at 30,000 feet today in the winged tube of death.

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 14, 2024 at 8:52 PM

    [dbs] Maybe spend a few cycles on your sabbatical (re)visiting the philosophy of the stoics. It has help me with acceptance and tranquility.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Opening Day

I work for Intel and today is the start of my 8-week sabbatical. This is one of the unique perks my employer provides and I want to make the most of it. I think we Americans can get stuck in the daily rat race and lose sight of the bigger picture. For 8 weeks, I have the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a person living in the 21st century. Why do we live the way we do? What does it mean to be human? Is there a goal to our existence? How can we bring about the best in ourselves and in those around us? Should we even use terms like "better" and "best" when referring to ourselves? So many questions. I picked up my copy of A Course in Miracles this morning. One sentence jumped out at me: "You are free to believe what you choose and what you do attests to what you believe." What this appears to tell me is there are different ways to believe. One way is through the words we speak and think. The story we tell ourselves about the world. And then there...
Read more

The Aisle Seat Part 2

Well, I tried the aisle seat experiment. I sat with my eyes closed, counted from 100 to 1, pictured a movie screen in my mind and visualized an empty aisle seat. When we queued up to board the plane, we were the last four people to board. I knew the selections were sparse, so when I saw a middle seat in the second row, I took it. Melissa got a middle seat in the emergency row and both boys got window seats. So, the result was the one I mentioned yesterday and now I'm left with the question: Does manifesting reality not work or did it just not work in this situation? I grew up in a Pentecostal church, which practices varying shades of "word of faith." In essence, you can claim something, pray about it and receive it. I'm pretty sure this is nonsense as it's commonly presented, but I do think there's a certain kind of truth to it. First, do I think my thoughts can bend reality and retroactively cause someone to not pick an aisle seat? Probably not (though Meliss...
Read more

Forgiveness

Riffing off the karma idea, I want to explore a related idea: forgiveness. There's a story Jesus tells of a man who accumulated a large debt, more than he could pay back in his lifetime. He appears before a king and throws himself on the mercy of the court. The king looks at his situation and forgives the entire debt. The man walks away grateful. Several months go by. The king hears that this man had a similar situation with another person over the matter of $100, only he was the one who was owed money. Rather than forgive the debt, the man throws the person in debtors prison until he pays back the amount. The king brings the man back into court and says because of his action he will be placed in debtors prison as well until his original debt is paid in full. When I hear this story, I think about karma and the cycle of cause and effect. First, karma is not a punishment. It's a teaching tool for learning the consequences of choices. In Jesus' story we don't know how the ...
Read more