It is what it is

Tomorrow I'll be in class all day, and then Tuesday morning my daughter and I will fly off to Vermont for a week.  Some part of me is eagerly looking forward to a week away -- especially since we'll be staying with some very dear friends -- but another part of me is feeling a bit overwhelmed by all that has to happen between now and the time we leave.

But then, I always get a bit anxious before a trip.  It's not that I'm afraid of flying, it's more the complexity of the departure -- the rushing, and the logistics... I'm usually fine once I'm on the plane. 

But there's some other part of me this year that's watching me gear up for this and feeling very critical: why are you so worried? it says.  Your life is so much easier than the lives of so many of your friends right now; you should just be rejoicing in your good fortune!

Shoulds.  We all have them, we all hear them, and they are often terribly overwhelming.  I asked one of my classmates yesterday -- who in a coaching session had sailed to an island of shoulds -- how she could use her creative powers to cope with all those shoulds.  "I think I'd just burn the whole island to the ground," she said. And then she added, "But then I'd probably just create more shoulds."

And that's the kicker, of course: wherever they come from, we are often the ones who allow our shoulds to continue populating -- and it's hard to know which ones to keep and which ones just need to be burned out.  So what ARE the shoulds, anyway?  I think they are the voices inside that keep expecting us to be good at everything; to be perfect, in fact.  And of course Jack Kornfield has something to say about that this morning in A Path With Heart:

"We fragment our life and divide ourselves from it when we hold on to ideals of perfection.  In ancient China, the Third Zen patriarch taught that "True enlightenment and wholeness arise when we are without anxiety about nonperfection."  The body is not perfect, the mind is not perfect, our feelings and relationships will certainly not be perfect.  Yet to be without anxiety about nonperfection, to understand that, as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross puts it, "I'm not okay, you're not okay, and that's okay," brings wholeness and true joy, an ability to enter all the compartments of our life, to feel every feeling, to live in our body, and to know a true freedom. ...The purity that we long for is not found in perfecting the world.  True purity is found in the heart that can touch all things, enfold all things, and include all things in its compassion."

So as some part of me anxiously watches another part of me gear up for the trip, and yet another part of me sneers at the anxious part, I will just try to hold them all lightly in a loving embrace, and expand that embrace to include all my friends who are struggling today.  Sometimes life is just difficult, and sometimes some part of us is just determined to make it seem difficult.  But really, well -- it just is what it is, and you just have to let it flow.