When I began this blog, I had great misgivings about sharing my thoughts and ideas with the worldwide webisphere. I had a strong aversion to the very idea, thinking it absurd that anyone, anywhere, would give a shit about what *I* had to say. Afterall, this old soul finds it difficult to stomach the very exposed, very public life we all lead now thanks to the pervasiveness of technology and social media. It is as though we all feel entitled to our proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, only we don’t kindly take our bow at minute fifteen. Instead, we keep prattling on, when we should be pausing to think first about what we are about to say or do…
So why, then, would i follow suit? Well, because I came across something the Buddha wrote about sharing one’s light with the world. It resonated with me deeply, because for quite some time, I have felt that we each have a duty beyond our selves in this world – ideally, we should strive to be the best we can be, and that should include some stewardship to our fellow human beings in the world around us. I believe we have the power to change our realities in huge ways even with the simplest of changes in our own lives. If we spew hate and anger and self-centeredness out into the world, you just add to the weight on that side of the psychic scale. But what if you chose to actively focus on emitting only positivity, light, and love? Even on the smallest of scales, with the tiniest of gestures or simplest of words…
At the time I began sharing my light, I really didn’t feel as though I had a light to shine. I felt like the BIC I had been holding up at the concert all that time was about to just fizzle out and die. I was in a rather miserable place, though not the most miserable I have ever seen. I was wallowing through my days trying to decide what to do with a medical degree I did not want and a marriage in which I was sorely miserable. I was trapped in a life that I had every hand in designing for myself, and I had become a shell of who I was in the process. I hated who stared back at me from my mirror each day, and I was determined to evolve. I decided to turn everything in my life upside down, and in so doing, I took a chance on me for a change; and I began to bank on my own creativity and talents when I opened The Crepe Confectionary. Maintaining my shop, designing and cranking out orders all day was one thing, but blogging was something I saw as a challenge I put to myself in the spirit of my evolution.
It wasn’t always easy to find the time, the energy, or the topics to share, and I often found myself struggling with how personal to become with *you*, my readers, or what direction to allow myself to meander into with my writing here. When my life began to implode around me about a year ago, the blog became something I hid from. I felt like my light had all but just about gone out…
But in the year since, while I haven’t been here sharing and sometimes prattling on, I HAVE been evolving, and the result is that I am a wholly different me. I’m not done with the process by any means, and truly, none of us ever should be; however, I am far more satisfied and hopeful about the direction in which I am going. In the last year, I have gone from wife to single woman, I have dismantled and said goodbye to a beautiful home into which I poured my soul, I have had to learn to live on my own for the first time in my life, believe it or not. My life has not been easy or simple or predictable in any way in the last year, but I have absolutely engaged in the process every step of the way. It has been exhilarating, painful, exciting, bittersweet, frustrating, and enlightening all at once. I am learning to live without a plan, without a net, and without expectations. I am welcoming in hope, love, patience, understanding, truth, and most importantly, grace.
I have thought about writing again here for some time, but have not felt as though the time was right until now. And where to begin? I guess I was waiting for some signal from the universe that it was time, and I received it today…a comment from a reader hoping for my return. This new reader could have stumbled upon my dusty old blog, found some stuff interesting, others boring, and moved on, but she didn’t. She took a moment out of her day, no doubt busy with the work of her own self evolution, caring for her husband and children, tending to a boss, etc., to send me some light and love in the form of a sweet, kindhearted comment. To find it was a surprise, to read it was a joy, and to know that perhaps my ‘light’ provides some sort of comfort or relief or (or distraction?) to some stranger in the world, is incredibly gratifying on a level that nothing within me has ever before reached.
So while I may bemoan our addiction to social media and technology from time to time, I am also smart enough to see that it has some positively wonderful side effects as well. It connects us in ways we never could have dreamed before, allowing us to share our ideas, our feelings, our creativity, and our knowledge. If we choose, we can send our light out into the world.
The Buddha also said that we are each the universe, that we contain the entire universe inside of us. As I close my return here, I’ll borrow a metaphor from my high school math lessons in logic (you know, if A = B, and B = C, then A must also equal C, right?). so, if we send our light out into the world, and we are the world, imagine all that light just waiting for us…
I am ready for that light.
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