The Profundity of the Mundane.
Seeing how it all fits together.
This most recent November, I ended my two-year stint in the Midwest and drove back to California. The decision was not spontaneous, but still unexpected, and I left with no real plan beyond quit my job, sublet my apartment, and drive to Sacramento. None of my reasons for leaving were entirely true, because I didn’t really know. I left, ultimately, because I felt like it; because I had to; because a stronger, clearer part of me wanted to go more than the other part wanted to stay.
I spent the first couple of months after moving on high-alert, searching for the answers to my future and waiting for the moment at which I realized, this was why I had to leave. I wanted desperately to know why I had returned, and for something outside of my own body to confirm my decision as the right one. I wanted to experience something so amazing that could never have happened had I stayed in Chicago: an experience that would make everything clear, and erase all subsequent moments of doubting myself or fearing what was to come. I wanted to be able to point out to anyone who asked, I moved so that this could happen. Life is amazing and I’m so beyond happy now.
I have since realized that this moment of perfect clarity will never come; simultaneously, I’ve seen that many of the beautiful experiences I’ve been waiting for have, in fact, already happened.
There is meaning woven into every experience, though meaning may not be as profound or as obvious as we may like it to be. We may never find the meaning we are looking for, or even find any meaning, at all. We may be prodded to say yes or no to something without ever “figuring out” why we did—its meaning may seem relatively meaningless.
Synchronicity, as Ram Dass lightly defines it, is “seeing the relationships among things. It’s about seeing the perfect ways in which [things] appear and juxtapose to each other.”1 He says that if we stand back far enough, we are able to see that everything appears in such a perfect, synchronistic way. Noticing how things relate to one another may indeed reveal to us that everything is related: every moment depends on what came before and affects what comes after.
Paying attention to how one thing leads to another can bring magic to our everyday lives: we may discover exquisite patterns in what seems mundane. As each day is comprised of the mundane, perhaps this is what we ought to be giving our presence to.
We don’t always know why we are led down certain paths, or away from other ones; we may never know why certain people or places come into and out of our lives. We may not know what one choice may lead to until we arrive somewhere entirely unplanned—and, hopefully, delightfully rewarding. It often takes time to see the results of what we show up for and pour energy into each day. We can’t figure it all out, and we aren’t supposed to be able to: life, in all its mysterious glory, may do that work for us. We are simply invited to make intuitive decisions, and trust ourselves.
There may be a particularly incredible opportunity, soon or in the distant future, at which I recognize that I couldn’t have been here if I hadn’t done that then. And, this moment I’m experiencing right now is perhaps such a moment—I certainly wouldn’t be working this new job, living somewhere else, meeting different people, if I’d chosen to stay instead of go. I don’t really know where my decisions are leading me, and it isn’t up to me to figure it out. I’ve begun to see that it really does all fit together, somehow.
Maggie
Quoted from his lecture “The Possibility of Unconditional Love”