What Do You Think?

We often become overwhelmed as we try to figure things out. It's not uncommon for life to hand each of us a challenge from time to time, and sometimes those challenges seem to be more than we can handle. Especially when we are tasked with making decisions that seem so monumental, and provide no guarantee of outcome, that our emotions cloud our ability to assess the situation clearly. Like many other times in our life, when asking for other's advice or opinions, we will ask them the same question that they will ask us: "What do you think?"

Let's step back a moment and acknowledge the inherent misconception of attention here. The question itself directs us away from where the answer we seek resides. This question is more appropriate for us to ask of others than for others to ask of us, which is where the lapse of awareness lies. The only answer that others actually can give us is to tell us what they think of our situation - and when they tell us what they think we should do, what they are telling us is what they would do; and even more correct is to say that they are telling us what they'd like to think they'd do if they were in our situation, based on who they think they are, not being in our situation. It's easy to get lost in the gap between who we are (if we wish to define who we are by what we choose), and who we'd like to think we are.

The more accurate acknowledgement would be to ask ourselves, or for others to ask us: What do you feel? And herein lies the conundrum; everybody else can tell us what they think we should do, or what they think they would do, but it is only us, and we, ourselves, alone, who feel the multitudes and layers of our conscious and un/subconscious thoughts which register as emotions and sensations in our body. The entirety of our existence is holographically imprinted in each of our cells and the most liberating, and terrifying, realization is that nobody else has our answer. So, that is in itself an excrutiatingly beautiful solitude. We are invited to put down the worry and asking-of-others so that we can relinquish ourselves into the personal space of solitude where the answers we seek are waiting to be found. It is a sobering realization that although we can often find resonance in the opinions of others when they reflect back to us what we already know but do not yet see, it is when we come to a place where we can, even briefly, recognize and acknowledge the divine moment of stillness within ourselves that we can invest our faith in the answers we find, with knowledge that the stillness within us resides in a timeless place which we are blessed enough to access and have pass through us, like a radio station signal picked up by the antenna of ourselves. The station is always broadcasting if we will only tune in.