the question of discipline- how can i develop discipline so that i can develop skills, explore passions and learn more deeply- is one that i have held since the days of ditching middle school 4 days a week and trying everything for just too brief a time. this question, whenever it arose and it did so quite often, arose in fits of frustration and hate for myself; never did i hold it sweetly inside myself, never patiently letting the answers arrive in my life as life chose to present them. i held this question over myself, always beyond reach, dangling it 10 stories high, or often, just too few inches too far. i used it to show myself that i am the same old unchanging me- unruly and too wild of mind to be too good at anything.
but i must remind myself that i am living the answers, it’s just that the answers seem to go hiding in the vastness of the mutating environments of life. they are forgotten sometimes, buried in memories i no longer can remember. and i need to remember. i need to remember that these answers that go missing can always be found in the subtleties of the day-to-day, the mundane and the minute. i become answer for that minute moment on that mundane day- whether i realize it or not- it realizes itself in me. these brief and fleeting moments are incredibly important because soon, my dear one, once these brief and fleetings become abundant and piled high, i will realize that i have been answer all along.
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free write written for radical fuckin’ sangha, a meditation space for organizers and revolutionaries, held on tuesdays at Oakland Makerspace. the prompt was on a quote by ranier maria rilke:
“have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”