Seeing Life Outside of the Blankets

Never in my past have I ever thought that if I had to live my life again I would do things differently. But in the past two years, and most especially the past 4 months, my life has changed so dramatically that I now realize that perhaps I never really ever gave the true quality of my life much thought.

I'm not saying that I have any regrets in my life, because I've come to accept that what has been and what will be are unimportant. What I'm saying is that, if you live your life under a blanket you may go an entire lifetime without ever realizing that outside of that blanket an entire universe awaits you. You can die right there -- perhaps blissfully, who knows -- but also perhaps in abject misery, pain, loneliness, and bitterness, without having ever learned that life had to offer an infinite number of possibilities and alternatives, including everything that you had come to understand as things that are fundamentally "you" in your mind's eye.

Throughout my life I've had so many layers of blankets. With each passing decade I've seen blankets added, shuffled around, maybe changing a bit in character, but mostly just sort of shuffling about overhead. I've experiences the briefest moments of life outside, but as whispers of another world that didn't actually really exist.

Now, through a series of circumstances, I've been stripping off those blankets, one by one, and gathering the momentum to actually step out into life and see it as it was, I think, always meant to be seen. The veil that I've always had in my perceptions and thoughts is lifting, and I'm beginning to change my definition of what I always thought was real and what was fiction.

It's been work. And it's been suffering. I did a 72-hour fast this past weekend, and I spent some time thinking about my life and how I really have no idea what true suffering is. Still, I don't deny that we all suffer in some way. If we didn't we wouldn't have murder, destruction, hate, prejudice, and negativity in this world.

It is my hope that I can take this strength that I feel and continue to nurture it in myself and look about at the world and see it through my new vision, and maybe so very gently and mindfully and softly touch people who are also hiding under the blankets of their own lives, blindly trying to make their way in a seeing world.