I had a beautiful experience early this morning. I was in the middle of a nightmare about our family network being actively attacked and all of my devices becoming compromised as I fruitlessly tried to fight back. The attacker was swiftly making a meal out of my corp laptop when suddenly, I had this weird sense that something was off about the whole situation. A thought crossed my mind: “This is all a dream. I don’t have to be doing any of this.” So I stood up from my chair, closed my eyes and looked inward. There was a brief sense of falling through emptiness… and I woke up, startled and exhilarated, broken free from the nightmare.
This sense of release, this moment of liberation is something I’ve experienced before. It’s that moment of clarity, realizing how the seemingly all-important mundane swallows us all and consumes our lives. All of the stress and worries and jittery meandering around center–seeing it, but never quite reaching it–all of the churn and the tug-of-war are just a bad dream. So many of us are gripped in the struggle of Fears. So few of us are able to pause and go: “Wait, I don’t have to be doing any of this” and wake up. Waking up is not easy. It takes suffering and struggle. But the point of life is not the struggle itself. The point of life is waking up.