On The Joy Of Interruption
Oh the joy of interruption.
I am starting to love this process. This yielding of control, the ceding of sovereignty. There is a softness that comes with letting go – an awakening to the realisation that this is not mine and I do not need it to be. Gently, oh so gently, it opens my eyes to the barriers I have built both around writing and in life more widely - the barriers by which I define my identity. The belief that, once having discovered something I am good at, it must be protected because it defines me as me. Its quality must be preserved, taken very seriously, revered.
The process of letting go blows that preciousness wide open. It declares that the flow of writing opens the gates to something that is far bigger than my minuscule concept of self. This bigness expresses itself – be that through writing, or art, or singing, or music or whatever thousand other ways it chooses. There is such joy in letting go of the little self, to frolic and wallow instead in the vastness of what can only sensibly be called love.
And then the phone rings. I tell whoever is calling that I’m deaf and to text me, then put the phone down.
At first there is a brief sense of resentment – that this time is too important to be interrupted. Then I look at my resentment, the effrontery I feel, and realise it is part of the smallness of identity - that once I realise the greatness of love that is ceaselessly around me, I see that interruptions really do not matter. My willingness to yield is not affected by interruption. The opening of myself does not require continuity. The spirit of love is never perturbed.
In this lovely, joyful space I look back at self, at identity, at my learned inclination to protect it and I begin to realise how common a pattern it is. For there is a preciousness in the world, a seriousness, a guarding of what has been gained for fear of loss– a space in which the unending accessibility of love is not seen, not understood. And because we do not perceive the endless sufficiency of love, we learn to guard our little light with formality, with rules and procedure, with exclusion and limited access.
All of this is about protection of the self, the identity. But in defending our space in this way we cut ourselves off from the greater space - the love itself. Often, we achieve the protection we seek but it is the protection of the mausoleum. For inside that tomb of identity the very thing we fight to protect has died without our realising it.
The antidote lies in realising that what is light in us, what is love and life, cannot be protected. It comes only to be released, only to be given away, only to be granted the unrestricted right to fly away as it chooses. And when we get used to that idea, we sit with it, palm upwards, fist open. For at that point we discover Love wants to be with us and does not fly away.