Wherever You Go, There You Are
There is a scene in the Star Wars movie, Rogue One, where Chirrut, a wise, old guardian of the Jedi temple, has been imprisoned with a younger, more ambitious Captain Cassian Andor of the Rebel Alliance. Cassian brushes off Chirrut’s suggestion that any help from the “Force” will help them get out of their predicament. Chirrut, intuiting that there are deeper things churning in Cassian, responds by saying:
"There is more than one sort of prison, captain. I sense you carry yours wherever you go.”
Woof. Talk about cutting to the chase.
This is a modern adaptation of an old idea, but a lesson that we all need to learn over and over again. People, myself included, often look for something in our external reality to change in order to produce an internal peace. But it doesn’t work. The IF -> THEN equation of contentment will always disappoint. Whatever we’re chasing isn’t changing the stuff we’re carrying around inside us. As the title of Jon Kabbat Zin’s book suggests, Wherever You Go, There You Are.
We must learn to cultivate inner peace. And we can do that pretty much anywhere. I tend to find myself overestimating what I need to relax when I feel stressed. I’ll feel stressed and think to myself: The only thing that would satisfy me is a week in the mountains by myself. Then I get fixated on this, and when I can’t have it, I get all the more frustrated and discontent.
This desire to escape is one we all feel from time to time, but it is a misleading fantasy. Seneca had something to say about this kind of thinking:
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
I tried to put this into practice recently when I was feeling tired. Rather than huff and puff and act put out because I didn’t “have enough time to rest,” I used what I had. I tried to respond like a different person - not just defaulting to longing to get to a different place. My schedule had opened up and rather than squeeze every ounce of productivity out of my day, I relaxed and enjoyed a few slow moments on my back deck. Nothing huge, but intentional.
I was surprised by how a little bit of slowing down recharged me. I felt lighter, refreshed and ready to work with clients the second half of the day. And nothing fell apart. It can be tempting to want to run off to the mountains in order to heal yourself, but author Alan Watts wrote something about this too:
“The only zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the zen you bring up there with you.”
Your path to healing is not “over there” somewhere. It is right here, right now, for better or worse. Slow down and start listening to your inner world today, and learn to respond generously in whatever way you can. You might as well learn to have a positive relationship with yourself since you take yourself with you wherever you go.
Happy to be in your corner,
Tom
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