The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.”
Anne Morrow Lindberg
Gift From the Sea

It is hard, this business of living open, empty, choiceless. Everything in us wants to choose, wants to know what is going to happen and when it is going to happen and can’t it please happen now? It is hard to open our arms and our heart, to simply breathe, to be present, and not want to grasp and scramble across the beach grabbing up every sea shell on our path, every bright shiny object, whether it is right for us or not, simply so as not to have empty arms, to try to feel full. But you can only fill an empty cup. We must be empty first. And we must wait, and allow the sea to deliver the gifts that are truly ours. This is something that is no easier for me at 64 than it was at 14 and yet the older I get the more important a lesson this is to learn. There are fewer years left, fewer gifts to be had, and I will only receive them if I do not run about helter skelter grabbing up every sea shell on the beach. I must wait. I am learning to wait.

A couple of days ago here I wrote a post about the fact that I had finally come to a place, even with all it’s imperfections and problems, of being exactly where I am supposed to be. Where we are supposed to be, where we need to be, to receive the gifts that are truly ours to receive, is to be in a place of acceptance for what is, right now, in this moment. All of it. To love ourselves as we are in this moment, and to feel gratitude for all of the blessings in our lives, and for most of us I think there are many more than we often stop to count. I am learning to count my blessings, and to love myself, as is. In this way I am creating fertile, open ground for more beauty and wonder to grow than ever before. In my life I have been grasping, and acquisitive, my eye always looking at the shiny objects and wanting to have them all. At 64, and after having lived through a devastating fire where I lost so much, things are less important. People, my animal companions, experiences, love, those are what matter most now. And for the most part those are things that must come to me without my searching for them. This is very hard for me. I am learning, slowly.

I am in the last one or two or three decades of my life. There is no longer that sense of unending time and space before me. What I will do, be, and have must be carefully chosen, with thought and care, and in a way it becomes harder, with a sense of limited time left, not to want to rush and hurry and grab for the things I so desperately, in my heart, long for. But, at this age, I can finally see that that kind of trying so hard to have it all can mean you end up empty handed. To wait with open arms and see what will come to us, now, at this juncture, because of the life we have built, and are building, the way we are now shaping our days, and with more gratitude than we have ever had, and with the knowledge that there is nothing more important than to be loving, to give love, to spread love every way that we can, well, spreading this love is, in my mind, like spreading a fine net across the sandy shore. Surely in it’s fine strands just exactly what we most genuinely need will come to us, in perhaps unfathomable ways. I am believing that, I am trusting that. I have thrown my head back, my face upwards to the sun, my eyes closed, my arms open.

There are gifts, they are coming. I cannot yet see them but I know they are on the way. And with a loving, open heart I am ready, my empty cup is waiting to be filled, and with the excited expectancy of a child on Christmas eve I am trusting, believing, and ready to receive. I’m a little scared, but I feel movement in the air. Something is on the way.