It was an ordinary Sunday morning in a coffee shop known for its new age inclinations. The server wore a t-shirt with the following message: “Limitations only exist if we let them.” Magical thinking.
Limitations are what make life interesting and challenging. We have limitations everywhere…of time and space and resources of every kind. As destructive as we are in a world of limitation, how much more so would we be if not subject to limit? We are dull enough with the benefit of limits that force us to shift and change. If our every wish could be fulfilled, would we be more awake or less?
What’s so bad about limitations anyway? Limitation is finding what is right for me among the many things that are not. Limitation is knowing something well: to find water, you must dig in one place.
Can I really be whatever I want, have whatever I want, if I just want it enough? Does my thinking really have such power?
I know that negative thinking destroys creativity and takes away energy, closing me to what is possible. Does positive thinking have the reverse effect? Can I guide my life to my chosen goals through affirmations? It seems to me that my best responses to life, the moments less troubled by what I lack, are moments of silence and space, not wordy affirmations.
When I want what I want, then it seems I am most powerless and ‘dry’. When I am at the center, I am most alone and unaided, least able to proceed. If there are moments of magical thinking, when more seems possible and new openings surprise me, it is when I am dancing with the universe, when it leads and I follow, no agenda in mind.
Yes, I need my aims and understandings to begin. I take the steps I know and can. But then the world intervenes and I am moved. My agenda, my conceptual staircase to somewhere, is dislocated, shot through with light and shadow and air. What makes what I want the right thing or the best thing? What makes my constructed aims important when they are only made from the fluttering of insubstantial thought?
When thinking has weight, it is grounded in sensation, why else do prayer forms have movements and postures of the body? When thinking invites feeling, it develops wings. Then there can be magic, but not mine.
The universe is inherently uncertain. It will always be so. Can I embrace it?