It talks about crickets. They're not out this time of year, but pretend they are.
I'd had quite a stressful and humbling and annoying and insecure and crazy-making week week. And over the weekend, I feel like I integrated a lot of what I had learned and experienced. So last night I sat on my little storage bench on my back deck to meditate, as I do many nights. And as I was going into that state, I had the lingerings of last week and the insecurities it dredged up on my mind. So just as my head was going blank, I heard a very clear voice say, "you're so much bigger than that".
This wasn't about being superior or "too wise" or "too good" to concern myself with the people and situations at the center of my stress. Rather it was about how the essence of me...my soul...was bigger than the things that occupy my human mind here on this earth.
The thought was profound to me. I mean, obviously I know I'm a soul in a human body and all of that. And I've even got messages about how pedestrian some of our issues are from the vantage point of the soul. But this was the first time I'd considered it in THIS way....that I truly am bigger than the concerns I focus on day in and day out. I have dominion over them. So why keep letting them have dominion over me?
So as I sat listening to the crickets, it occurred to me that some things are truly important here. Some of the lessons we learn and people we connect with. But the lingerings of our angst, the pettiness of things we turn over and over in our minds, the confrontations and the soup of insignificance we steep in...we're bigger than that. We're bigger than our egos. We're bigger than anything we ever encounter on this earth.
My stresses of the past week ushered in an important lesson for me. But most of the angst and thought around it is stuff that matters not to the soul. The soul will carry the lessons you've learned throughout eternity. But all the other baggage that goes with it? The soul is bigger than that. Which means YOU are/can be/should be bigger than that.
My friend K will read this and remember when I told her to measure her anger and worries and angst on the scale of "will this matter in my life five years from now?". You can brush off a lot of annoyances and set aside a lot of mundane worries using that scale to eyeball the importance of things and whether or not they're worth wasting your time over.
But now here's another yardstick—is this thing that's occupying your mind...this thing you're not letting go of...is it bigger than you? Is it, in the form you're thinking of it now, something to carry through the ages? Or are you bigger than it? Have you taken the lesson that's relevant to your soul and moved forward knowing that no amount of whining and marinating is going to add to what you've already learned?
It's amazing how easily you can let go of something, snap back into perspective and rise above when you remember how big you truly are.
As I said at the beginning of this blog, all of this happened last year. But this past weekend I was hit with something challenging to my ego self and I remembered I was bigger than that. And I made a different choice because of it. I made a choice that spread love and not angst. And I'm proud of that...proud of remembering I'm so much more than my fears and can greet them with grace. We choose how we respond to things. We can always make a different and better choice.
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