Friday, April 30, 2010

What Am I Supposed to Do?

This morning my mind woke me up singing Norah Jones' "What am I to you?" ... only the words were "What am I supposed to do?" 

I'm not sure why or what the object of the question is ... what am I supposed to do about what?  There are a lot of questions in my mind right now ... most of them of the everyday variety, some of them of the "which path to take" type but none of them the huge "spin in circles" sort so why is my mind rewriting Norah Jones songs and playing them like a wake-up radio station?  Is there something I'm missing?  Is there something I'm supposed to do that I've overlooked?

I've often thought that if the Universe wanted to deliver a message to me that it would be far more effective if it just wrote it in ten foot letters across the sky.  This subtle nudging just makes me a little crazy.  Does it mean X or Y?  Does it mean anything at all?

By the time I got out of bed and was brushing my teeth, my mind was playing words from Rilke ... but just out of hearing.  I could feel the rhythm and sense the meaning but couldn't get the actual words so I went to my quote file and found:
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear friend, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you, because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. 
 -- Rainer Maria Rilke
Great advice but that wasn't exactly what I was hearing so I prowled around further until I realized I was hearing T.S. Eliot's message from The Four Quartets, which I think I've posted here before:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
So what am I supposed to do?  Wait.  What do I want to do?  Not wait.  "But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."  And life is giving me the opportunity to wait so I'm going to breathe in and wait.  Today I will even try to wait graciously.

3 comments:

  1. One thing the Eliot says to me is accept the moment and not make of it more than its existence; don't crowd it with thoughts of what might or should or could be. Also, that we'll know what to do when the moment for deciding comes. Light does come out of darkness; we have to go through night to get to morning. In the stillness, anything is possible, imaginable, thus the "dancing".

    I've these same two quotes to a number of people and they speak loudly to me today (lots of questions and waiting for me, too these days). I'm going to dry to breathe in deeply too and wait for the sign.

    Hugs. Namaste.

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  2. Ahhh, waiting.

    And in the process, filling each moment with life, beautiful, precious, exquisite life.

    My dear friend, you are amazing.

    And... a wonderful time to visit the big C is... Stampede -- July 9 - 18... nothing to wait on, just to do and be present.

    Hugs

    Louise

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  3. Waiting for Godot;he won't show.

    However,..

    "But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." (Isaiah 40:31)

    --ddb

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