We Only Lose What We Cling To...

I was going to post on my day one taper but something has happened in the interim that takes priority. It takes priority over an update because how I transcend it will surely affect some of my readers and the decisions that they make going forward. I can't maintain a self-help blog without speaking from experience and without explaining to my readers that I am human, that transcendence is possible.

I lost all of my writing from the last two years.

All of it.

I realized it last night after highlighting some of my writing achievements to one of my followers. In the transfer from one Google account to the next, I had permanently deleted my Google Drive on my old account without backing it up. Since everything was stored in the cloud, everything is now gone.
At first I panicked. Who wouldn't? Then my warrior training kicked in and I had to evaluate the situation from a spiritual perspective.

In Dan Millman's book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Socrates reminds Dan to "let it flow, and let it go." This meant that he wanted Dan to feel his emotions about a given thing, and then let them go, to leave them, and the stimulus, in the past. Socrates' responses to life were not predictable, not planned. They were spontaneous. Socrates watched his thoughts and his emotions and his expectations pass like clouds before him, feeling no more connection to them than he would the next breeze. 

Circumventing our knee jerk reactions to things takes years and years of practice.

I'm not there yet. What a gift!

Rather, I was forced to revert back to something I had heard many years ago when watching a documentary on Joseph Campbell and his search for answers about why people believed what they did.

If you had a crystal glass, you could watch the light refracting off of it, brilliant colors. If you had ice and water or even liquor in the glass, you could see the reflection of the light through the fractals. It would look beautiful. Maybe you could even run your finger along the edge and it would make a sound to sing the unspoken potential of every possible color in the Universe.

Suppose then, that you were to drop that glass on the ground and it were to shatter.

The Buddha would be unmoved by it's destruction, because he would know that the moment the glass came into his awareness, it was already broken.

We only lose what we cling to.

I felt the pain of losing the writing and then let it go, embracing the realization that everything I wrote would be published under my own name going forward, that it would be written from the hand of someone who knew that every word was worth as much as he.

I will no longer hide behind a pseudonym.

What falls into our past nourishes our future.

posted from Bloggeroid