Complacency

Being very tired tends to make me complacent.  My head is clouded with everything needed to be done.  Mind you, I am the one who has put the pressure on myself but after so many years it’s difficult to just let things go.  I am afraid that if I get too complacent I will watch my life go by and not do everything I think I want to do.  I find myself reading all of these sayings or quotes about how I should be living my life and after a while it gets quite overwhelming.

I know people who live their lives very content being complacent about everything and it doesn’t seem to bother them.  I guess it depends on what you think complacent means.  The dictionary (I love using that term even though we no longer physically use a dictionary!) says that complacency is a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements.
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Stillness

I have been listening to the lectures of Echardt Tolle and am amazed at how simple and yet how complex his teachings are.  I was especially intrigued and confused by his ideas of the stillness of our minds and the importance of finding the spaces between the words.

Now in my busy and ever chatting mind that seemed almost too surreal for me to grasp.  He speaks with a direct and methodical way that is both enchanting and hypnotic.  And, for the most part, totally unreachable for me right now.  I think I have grasped the concept, try it and realize how difficult it can be.

I know I have a tendency to belabor explanations when I am trying to get a point across.  I keep repeating myself to make sure that I am being totally understood.  A bad habit for me as it can make people restless and annoyed.  Many times I am not even aware of what I am doing.  It’s not that I think they don’t understand it’s that I am trying to convince myself that I have it right.

I started to think about those spaces in between my explanations that may help in slowing me down and only repeating myself once.  I find I want to explain myself to the world.  To make what I do matter not just to others but especially to myself.

What I discovered was how much I judged myself and how little I really trusted that what I have to say had meaning.  Or that it may have enough value for people to even spend their time  listening.  Insecurity raises it’s ugly head and the child in me says, “Look at me!  Look at me!”   Echardt Tolle is trying to say that we are enough.  That the silence between those words or even silence itself is enough.

And in that thought a deep emotion comes over me that makes me sad and hopeful at the same time.  To quote Echardt from his book  Stillness Speaks , “When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.”

I am striving to believe one finds there is no judgement of whether I am good enough but rather that stillness is enough to discover how valuable what I say can be if I come from I Am.