Hon Sha Za Sho Nen (a Reiki greeting meaning, the Divine within me recognizes the Divine within you)….
Life is messy, awkward, uncomfortable. We try to plan, have a Plan B, C or D…. we try to think of every possible scenario. We think we will feel better if only we can control situations and people, if only they would just listen to us!…..because, after all, we know what’s best. (I used to think this one all the time.) And then life happens as we are making other plans, as the saying goes. And when we are in a roller coaster situation of any kind, where things are spiraling and one thing after another is happening and all our well-laid plans are going awry….that’s when we wind up navigating by crisis. Or we try to plan for every eventuality, and the thing we never would have thought would happen, happens.
I guess this is coming up for me now because everything feels so heightened and intense in the world. It feels like we’re careening from one crisis to another. This feeling really came home to me in the last years of my mother’s life. I had no idea how I was going to manage everything, including her resistance to having more help, or eventually being in a nursing home…..and I just kept telling her, it’s all taken care of. It will all get figured out. I don’t know how, but it’s all taken care of already. Of course, I was terrified inside, and had no idea how it would be all taken care of, but I had no other option than to trust. And when my mom would get scared, she would say to me, it’s all taken care of, right? And I’d say, Yes, don’t worry, it’s all taken care of…..mostly because I had no other answer. And that helped manage my own fear.
And when her health situation spiraled out of control, and crisis after crisis began occurring…..in the midst of everything, we navigated….responding to each crisis, each symptom, we let ourselves be guided, directed, by what was in the present moment. Everything was happening too fast to handle it any other way than moment to moment, step by step.
And I didn’t do everything perfectly, but I did the best I could. I navigated by crisis. Maybe it looked like I was lurching from one decision and issue to the next…..but that was the way I had to navigate right then. And indeed, it all worked out, she and I were all taken care of in ways we couldn’t have imagined….and ultimately, we saw that it was for her highest good and that of all concerned…..no matter what it looked like along the way.
Just like now.