and then you wonder how you got here

The twists and turns that we travel on this path are sometimes befuddling. Not while you are negotiating the curves but after you have emerged. You look back and just have to marvel at some of the hairpin turns that you survived through. You remember being in the middle of that "knot" and feeling overwhelmed because the beginning or the end is not readily in view or apparent anytime soon. Your breath is quick and shallow as a sense of panic rises. Yet you forge ahead... or what you think is ahead hoping that the path will soon straighten out.

These thoughts floated last night as I lay in wait to slip into slumber. I imagined life as a string with a series of knots. Not all of them dire, I have to admit. Many more constituted self inflicted challenges of one kind or another. Some professional. Some personal. Very few that I regret in retrospect... and most of those now just seemed petty. This was actually an interesting revelation in this exercise of reflection. That what seemed important at the time is now of little significance.

Perhaps the further I journey along this path, the more I shed. I am hoping that is the case anyway. The baggage of our attachments may really be what keeps us hostage. Are we keeping them or are they keeping us? The attachments of importance... or more accurately what we have chosen to deem important. This is what creates our personal dogma of absolutes that we project onto the world... and we all have them in some form or another. Whether a believer or non we all have them... those judgmental absolutes that we inflict when our little worlds are threatened by the unfamiliar.

And even if we continue to shed the baggage in time we still hold on to a handful hoping that perhaps those may be the true ones. And sometimes in a flash of clarity you realize that what really got you out of those many knots was not the truth you attempted to impose on others but the courage to be honest with yourself.