A Glimpse Through the Clouds
I think I caught a quick glimmer of how things are starting to be easier and better.
Yesterday I felt the shift again. This time I felt it and then actually felt like I saw it, just briefly. The glimpse was just long enough and strong enough that it’s still with me this morning. And, from yesterday to today, it seems to have gained in clarity and intensity.
I’m resisting the urge to try and stare at it too hard or for too long, as I’m afraid that if I do that, the expectations I start to form may blur or erase it, kind of like how, if you stare at something long enough without blinking, what you’re staring at directly fades from view and all you’re left able to see is what’s on the periphery. I thought that writing about the experience might instead be a better way for me to pause long enough to hold it in awareness.
I felt the shift and then caught the glimpse of it either toward the end of or just after a particularly sweaty indoor cycling workout. This wasn’t the most intense of the indoor workouts I do, however was definitely up there on the intensity scale.
Just for a second, it felt like things stopped and got quiet. While I wasn’t registering any sound at that second, everything in my field of view seemed to sharpen and intensify in the natural sunlight that was pouring in through the windows, reflected by the river. I’m guessing that at this point I remembered to take a deep breath and did feel a wave of tension leave me as I was experiencing this.
I experienced what felt like a scaffolding, or better yet cage, of sorts, falling from around my mind. When this happened, a feeling of well-being, hope, and optimism, seemed to settle, first in my mind, then spread throughout my body, which I experienced again as tension leaving and my body feeling lighter as a result.
Later on, and especially this morning, I couldn’t help but relate this experience to a book I’m reading, The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen. Without getting into the details, the book chronicles the author’s journey through the Himalayas. I connected what I experienced, the glimpse of the shift, to what Peter may have experienced, when the clouds would part and unexpectedly reveal a glimpse of a magnificent, yet imposing, mountain peak.
An observation that stuck me about my experience is that the sense of well-being I experienced wasn’t based on the typical frame of reference, framework, or metrics I’ve used in the past to let myself feel good or bad about how things may be at any point in time. The well-being I experienced felt like it was based on something else entirely.
This is the part that makes me optimistic about the changes I’ve been making, in the hope that the changes are helping me to shift my frame of reference and open myself-up to new ways of being, that inform my doing, in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before, as long as I was constrained by my old framework. As I write this, it feels possible that the cage I felt falling from around my mind was actually that old framework itself and, once it fell, I was able to catch a glimpse of the shift, through the clouds, to an easier and better way of being.
