The journal prompt one day in August was, What would you change about yourself if you could? It appeared on the facebook page of the coaching group I attend once a week and we were instructed, by our fearless leader, to answer right there in the thread. Usually we are instructed to write our response in our journal, which is private, but this time we all got to see everyone’s answer.
I was in the woods at my sister’s cabin when I first saw the prompt. Standing outside, with my computer on a dry wall close to the neighbor’s house so I could borrow his WiFi, I was getting mercilessly bitten by mosquitoes but enjoying the chirping of the birds and chipmunks all around me. I don’t have a smart phone, nor do I want one, so I still have to find WiFi to see email and facebook.
My initial response to the prompt was something like this: Nothing, I’m perfect. Everything, I’m an idiot.
And because I had just finished reading A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki I added: Perfect person, idiot. Same thing.
Which it is, really. And I don’t know, maybe you need to study Zen Buddhism for years and years to really understand how it’s the same thing but to me, without being able to describe why, in words, I just feel like it makes total sense. We’re all connected, everything is one, minute pieces of the same giant cloth. There’s an explanation for it in physics, I guess, but that’s beyond my grasp. If anyone ever came up with one of those machines you see in sci-fi movies where a person puts what looks like a giant colander on his or her head and then miraculously receives encyclopedic knowledge instantly, I’d want to try it out. I’d ask to be given the knowledge of fluency in at least 20 different languages so I could truly be a citizen of the world and be able to communicate with, empathize with people all over the planet. Maybe I’d even make Klingon one of the languages, just in case. I’d also request an instantaneous understanding of as many different philosophies as I could think of right there on the spot, with the wired up pasta strainer on my head. Then I’d ask to know every single thing Stephen Hawking knows about physics. And, at last, perhaps I’d be able to explain how I feel to almost everyone.
How To Overthink Almost Everything 