The Constant State of Fix

It's early Monday morning and I just spent a glorious weekend reading. I finished three books this weekend: "The Dance of the Dissident Daughter" by Sue Monk Kidd, "The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff, and "Be," by A.C. Ping. I made significant progress in "Conversations With God - Book 3" by Neale Donald Walsh, "Do," also by Ping, "A Whole New Mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual Age," by Dan Pink, and "Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future" by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers.

All of these books are calling me to some sort of action, even if that action is stillness, which for me may be the most significant.

I recognize that throughout my entire life, my most familiar state is a state of fix. I remember always striving, striving, striving to be better, to do more, to learn more, to achieve impossible goals and then never be satisfied with the results. But that is what the constant state of fix demands. By its very definition - like perfection - it is unachievable.

This state has become familiar, although it is no longer comfortable. When it was both familiar and comfortable, it would allow me to long for someone else to show me the way, someone else to guide me toward the awakening I knew was there, but didn't see how I could achieve by myself.

Even as recently as earlier this morning, I found myself, while reading "Presence," with its profoundly moving accounts of the authors' journeys to knowing themselves and their connections with others and with nature, automatically shifting my thoughts to that familiar "well sure, they can do that. They've got money, fame, power, experience, (insert appropriate word for what they have and I haven't)."

I've found myself noticing when I start dwelling more on what I don't have than what I do have, which is a definite step beyond that old familiar state of fix. The noticing is great - but it will be the going beyond noticing to the action that I'll be striving for.

My dichotomy is where the doing and the being become blurred. As I've been so focused on mere doing, I know I must become more mindful of the being as well. So my dilemma is where one stops and the other takes over. Perhaps the difference will be in "mere doing" and "pure doing"; deciding and noticing when the doing is driven and when it is compelled.

Life is a journey, not an event, so how will I know when I've gotten "there"? Perhaps that is why it is a constant state of fix. The process is in the becoming, and maybe the goal is to be present in the becoming. It's not for me to decide when I'm "there." As Richard Bach said in Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah: "Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't."