Listen. Listen. Listen.
There is an ancient Dance
in your veins
a rhythm in your Heart
– Sri YanchiGuruji 1
Why does it often seem only the privilege of artistic prodigies, the financially secure or even dropouts, to choose to move through the day according to the rhythm of their own inclination? We only seem to allow such privileges (albeit begrudgingly) to the Steve Jobbses, Picassos, Lady Gagas and bag ladies of this world.
I remember from a very young age a feeling of resistance at having to do certain things at certain times. I often still do and I know, so too do a lot of you reading this. Those feelings are relevant. Not that I was able to articulate this when I was younger, and no one around me was able to offer further understanding of those feelings. On the contrary.
Just as the growing generation of today, I was simply asked – mostly non-verbally – to follow the status quo: “This is how things are done”. I call this ‘the law-of-man’. Nobody realized or admitted that this law-of-man only serves an economy, and economic principles to build or maintain an “empire”. Parents, teachers, friends and colleagues lived – and therefore confirm in me – the same paradigm.
Yet, I remember hearing of people who somehow “escaped” the system of the 9 to 5 working ethos. They were mostly artists, adventurous entrepreneurs, or others with some extreme passion or drive. At the same time, I was made to feel I was not like them but rather just an ‘ordinary’ kid. So whenever I showed signs of disinterest in doing things the way they were “meant to be done”, it was considered a sign of laziness.
At some point in my life, I became convinced that I was lazy (contrary evidence notwithstanding), exacerbating an impulse to self-improve. After all, laziness has a bad reputation. It is deemed a bad habit that at most needs exterminating and at least requires the person to feel bad, threatening this ‘attribute’, setting them up to be a failure waiting to happen.
I am sure this is a common conundrum for all of us. In the human world created over the past few hundred years, there is now a vacuum when it comes to your natural life rhythms. At best, you are allowed to poo and pee according to the law of nature. But eating patterns, sleeping patterns, learning patterns, feeling patterns, contemplation patterns are all sophisticatedly regulated from the moment a baby draws its first breath until a human draws their last.
Why do so many teenagers miss out on relevant, profound education because at age ten it wasn’t yet clear to them what they wanted to do in life? Why isn’t your grandmother allowed to drop dead in her luscious garden when her time has come and she’s indicated that’s the way she’d like to go? Why are we so inflexible towards life taking its own course?
Once enough of us understand why, we will begin to ‘stop’, able to return more and more to feeling and insight as the basis of governing our practical day.
This will be a tiny yet significant step towards true progress.
© Sitara Morgenster
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1) These lines are from a longer poem titled ‘Don’t be afraid’, published in The Hanging Garden of Eden; The Ecstatic Confession of the Wisdom Adept Sri YanchiGuruji (The Dancing Lion Press, first edition 2009)
