Walking on Sunshine

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, not just for tomorrow, but in the here and now.

~ Carl Sanburg

Well.  Here I go.  I feel it’s time to share some of what I am going through.  Maybe some of you will think I have gone off “the deep end,” and for others, my experiences may resonate.  My fears of exposing all of the dumb things I have done in my life have kept me imprisoned and I want to be free.  So, here goes.

I have always walked with my head down.  The first time I actually noticed it was when I was 15-years-old.  I had a job on weekends raking sand traps at the local country club.  I arose at 5:00 and was at the course by 5:30.   In those days, there was no such thing as a “frost warning” like they have today.  If there was frost or dew on the fairways and greens, we just played.  On the first few holes each morning you could see the tracks on the green where the previous foursome had putted.  You quickly learned that you had to putt the ball a little harder and I can still envision my ball rolling towards the hole with a little rooster tail of water rising up in its wake.

My job of raking traps is pretty self-explanatory.  I met the other workers at the maintenance shed and we each grabbed an oversized aluminum rake and walked out into the sunrise.  We had a route which zigzagged and cut across fairway boundaries.  Our task was to soften and smooth the sand within the traps and to make them as fair for play as possible by removing any impediments, deposits or burrows left by critters during the night.

One morning we were walking down the first fairway into the rising sun.  I marveled at the way the rays and dewdrops united their talents to craft for us millions of rainbow diamonds.  For some reason I looked back up the fairway and saw our tracks in the condensation.  Theirs were straight lines and mine wandered side to side as if I was a blind man unsure of his course.  This vision alone is rife with metaphor.

I knew then, as I do today, that it was because I always walked with my head down and my gaze was on the ground before my feet.  I wasn’t because I was afraid of tripping or falling, I just always had my head down.  From then until now I have tried many times to walk with my head up and my eyes on the world around me.  By best guess and recollection, the longest I would maintain that posture—which included slumped shoulders—was, perhaps, ten paces.  Then my head would be back to the ground and my mind would be elsewhere.

Even when I walked with someone, my line of sight would always be at the ground, just ahead of my feet.  And I tried many times to look up.  I did!  But I could never maintain an upright position.

I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It’s a journey of recovery. It’s a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It’s already there.

~ Billy Corgan

I recently experienced what I would call a devastating loss.  Something of this magnitude would have put me into a months-long tailspin of sadness, despair and a deep depression.  Except this time something is different.  As of this writing, it has been but a few short weeks, yet it also seems like long ago.  This time, through my emotional trauma, I was given a gift; an opportunity to see myself.  And the person I saw has been living with me since I was about five-years-old.  I hated him. He is the embodiment of shame, guilt and self-loathing.

And he was me.

Or, to be more precise, he is who I thought I was.

We hear so often that “well, I’m sure this happened for a reason…”  It has become cliché.  Even as I type it I can hear it in a sing-songy voice.  But it is a matter of our perspective.  And, viewing it from a previously undiscovered perspective, I want to say that the blessing with which I have been presented—which I have experienced as celestial beams filling my body—is that through my loss, I have had an infinitesimal glimpse of who I really am; of who we really are.  And that glimpse is magnificent!

Whenever we suffer a loss or setback, we set our minds to either “making the best of it,” or “never doing that again,” or forcibly stuffing the pain down and doing our best to ignore it.  This time for me—and it has been with the help of angels, both ethereal and corporeal—I have been looking inward; inward at the lies I have told myself about myself and who I am.  This has provided me with an enlightenment of spirit.  Cursory evidence of such is that, as I made my three-mile trek this morning, I realized that my head was up and my spine was straight.  And I further realized that they had been all week!

Those of you who walk this way may think it is not a major event.  But I have shared with you here that I have been trying to walk this way for decades.  Heck, even when I was a reserve cop and needed to keep my head up for safety, I still found myself walking with my head down.  I could not control it!

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But now, this week, my head was held high and it sat directly over a straight spine.  All week!  Every day!  I was aware of my surroundings and the cars and people passing by.  And birds!  Turns out, they sing!  As I walked, I began to realize that the reason I’d held my head down all this time was due to the shame, guilt and self-loathing which upon myself I’d heaped throughout my life.  And the weight of those thoughts is beyond description.  I had decades of daily failures and embarrassments which I’d heaved upon the heap of my self-abhorrence until it literally weighed me down and was so displayed in even my posture while walking.

During my walk this morning, my mind was on the moment, not in the past nor in the future.  Well, I was thinking about telling you this…  But I was in the moment and in the moment there is an entire Universe.  It’s immense!  Who knew?!

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One further demonstration provided me this morning was when I noticed a passing motorist and it triggered a memory of an embarrassing moment in my past.  As I recalled it, I felt myself reliving the feeling of shame.  Within no more than a few seconds (whew!) I withdrew my thoughts from that past moment and noticed that my head was down, my eyes were directed at the sidewalk in front of my feet and my shoulders were rounded and slouching above a crescent-shaped spine.

Wow.  Just an tiny remembrance took me back to an embarrassing moment and the full weight of my lifelong wrong-thinking was right back upon my shoulders; not just the single moment but my lifetime of shame and self-loathing had again perched upon my shoulders and began pressing down upon me.

Shrug.   Disengage.  Leave the past behind, dropped upon the sidewalk of my past.  I’ll do my best to be grateful for this moment in life and not go back and pickup all the lies I’d told myself for all these years.

I’m grateful for the insight into my behavior that I am being granted.