A Little Pressure is Necessary

Life is full of pressure and pain. There are deadlines, hurts, illnesses, people treating you unkindly, tornadoes, wars, gossip, death. All the time. Everywhere.

And there is the pressure to be different than you are. All the time. Everywhere.

Everywhere you look you see ads whispering to you that you can be much more than you are now, if only you would listen to them and buy what they have.

Commercials shouting to you that bliss is just around the corner and you can have it in 6 easy payments.

But you know better. You know that bliss is never to be had without struggle and pain. Without wading waist deep through the mire of bullshit quick-fixes that this world piles high around us, you won’t even get close to happiness.

Happiness is hard work. That’s what they don’t tell you, that’s what they don’t know. Happiness is hard, hard work.

And it’s the wanting, the constant wanting to be something different than you are, to have something different than you have, the constant wanting that keeps us ever at arms length from Joy in What Is.

You want to lose weight, I know I do. We are constantly wanting to be a different size than we are. Wanting it so much that we can’t enjoy who we are at this very moment.

And what would happen if you gave up wanting to be thinner? Would you suddenly become an out-of-control glutton hitting every drive-thru from home to work and back again until you could no longer fit behind the wheel and would have to ride the bus until you were so large that you couldn’t get on the bus and you’d lose your job and your world would crumble and collapse into itself from the shame of it all?

I doubt it.

Try giving up wanting to be something different for a day — or maybe for a day at a time. Let the pressures of life mold you and shape you. It’s enough. You’re enough.

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~ by Kimberly Mason on May 30, 2011.