Sea Ya, Reactivity
Losing my mother was the final nail in the coffin for my emotional reactivity.
(For my belief in its righteousness. The practice died slowly, through replacement, but that’s a tale for another time.)
My mother dropped dead with no one to blame. Here one moment, gone the next, 49 years old, and all our lives were wiped away to start new in that moment.
In light of that overwhelming grief, what of the next few months could upset me? (Plenty.)
In light of that overwhelming grief-cocktail of emotions, how could I justify reacting to any of that? How could I even have days for myself if I was going to believe that my bad emotions were problems for me to demand the world solve on my behalf?
Before this event, I was just like the billions of other completely delusional people on the planet, thinking I could ask my husband for what I wanted from him. But after this I realized that behavior was as insane as if I had stared stubbornly at the sky and demanded my mother return.
As the world unfolds, it reveals the natural limits of the system, and arguing with those limits is futile. We want humans, others and ourselves, to be somehow immune to the limits of the system, or to be systems without limits, but this is our own irrational humanity.
It is the birthplace of shame saying, "something is wrong here," and the birthplace of pride saying "there's a righter way for this to be."
When something is wrong, reactivity uses that as my license to pursue change by any means necessary.
So I arrive at the limit of my joy (it shouldn't have a limit) to my sadness (which the world should not have offered me, if things were right) and then I get to go to war to win back my rightful joy and spout off all this un-right sadness I never should have had to experience.
In light of an enormous and blameless grief, there's nowhere for that to go, and thus I discovered where my experience is truly unlimited—I can think any thought, feel any emotion, and survive.
No emotion is an emergency to correct. Even the emotion that feels like it will kill me will not, unless I believe that feeling. Each of these emotions is a wave and I am not a sailor but the entire sea pretending to be a sailor.
I can only sweep away that fearful part of me which feels subjected to the waves, and embrace them in my own crushing, integrative depths.