Never-ending home improvement project. Everybody doing it. The plight of being human. Shoddy house (no matter how fancy) to shelter a tender fleshy body.
We make nice fences and gardens, grow big trees. Fix our plumbing and put up nice wooden doors.
We try our best to create a structure that can protect us from the elements, from an ever-changing world. Out there.
Shooting for the picture-perfect Pinterest home. More luxurious, perfect paint job, pruned garden, sealed cracks, throw blanket.
We’re constantly trying to make our bodies look good too. Feel good. Look younger. Fitter. Wrinkle-free.
And when all else fails, there’s the never-ending improvement project within. Healing, fixing, seeking.
Nothing wrong with any of it.
But…
The futility of fixing, improving, renovating has to get us on our knees at some point.
Death starring us in the face. Change and movement constant.
So what? Do we give up and let our bodies decay and our houses fall apart? Do we let our unhealed trauma fester and just sit in a corner waiting for it all to end?
Maybe we go through that phase. But it’s also a kind of running away.
Life is balance. and you don’t balance. Life is balance.
So the never-ending home improvement project of the flesh body, the brick house or the internal landscape of the psyche has to be seen through.
See through the endless running on a hamster wheel.
There’s always something to fix. Always something to improve.
But it is so important not to get stuck on this loop.
Life is not a never-ending project. That’s the mind’s version.
Life is Alive.
Yes, we can make our ‘houses’ better, cleaner, healthier.
The sweeping and the vacuuming and fixing and the healing. All good.
But don’t get stuck there.
The futility and the breaking point have to be seen, felt.
That’s why the mold in the corner of the room is a gift.
The cracked wooden floor is a gift.
Not being able to fix is a gift.
Because it makes clear the futility.
Fix this and then that pops up. Fix that and the other pops up.
Whack-a-mole.
Step back from whacking the moles. Lay down the ‘whacker’.
This is what the ‘world’ is.
The speed, the hectic-ness, the chaos – is the collective whack-a-mole, the collective stuckness on the hamster wheel, on the loop.
You see the futility.
You step back.
And notice the endless invitations (subtle and obvious) to re-enter the rat race. And these invitations extend to spiritual circles too.
Because this is at the core of ‘getting lost’.