24) Inner Peace

The tipping point arises. Life is a balance on a fulcrum, horizontal as a see-saw, vertical as a telegraph pole, or else one takes it, paradoxically, entirely as it comes. Ha! In that acceptance lies the true balance. We have ups and downs. We have leans away from and around about the vertical. We step off the straight and narrow. Acceptance allows for all the differentials, allows for compassion, allows for integration, allows for moment to moment. Stasis is a perception. All is in flux. Exercising presence is the way for the way, even as one goes away, or comes home. How else to stay in balance? San Francisco remains this place I once visited back in '82, even though I've now spent some four hours in its airport, with another two or more to wait before takeoff, even as I type. From the aircraft window coming in from Sydney, after a 14 hour flight, San-Fran looked like a suburban sprawl. Little to identify it from my vantage. I did not see the Golden Meme. Nor did I visit Robin Hoods island. But it did feel like I was a kid again while at arrest by security, playing at cowboys, with my hands up in the air while they frisked me. Thing is, all the personnel and all the passengers and all the people and all the souls involved in the traffic of life are either in flow, or chugged up in a sense of purgatory. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. To visit San Fran, solo, during my day's stopover would simply not be my preference. But had someone like my dearest friend come to collect me, then I would easily and happily have left the confines of this noisy United Air lounge, and taken my respite! Cell phones are ubiquitous. We are a communicating species. We chirp and tweet like birds on the wire. Some are discreet. Some, like the man about twelve feet away, holds forth as if this is his bored-room. We may all be of the same chattery species, but we are as differentiated as a menagerie. Beware the vultures. Beware the canaries. Both will suck your soul, and then fly away. There are times I avoid the company of others; this is one of them. I have no desire for constant chit-chat. I often wonder just how much we retain of the brief connection we make with strangers, especially he who plonks by, catches your eye, and tells you a life story. Yet listening is a service. Necessary, to him. Like this essay. Parables are meant not to inform but to draw out enlightenment. For me. Absolutely. Yet absolutes are not a parable. Facts are concrete, irredeemable. Even though some people call a spade a shovel. Even though some people have a beef. But certainty and the concrete, the iron-clad, the irrevocable, have a place. I do not wish for the person who fixes my vehicle's brakes to tell me a lie, especially once I'm down the highway. It is the constructs of the only way to drink one's tea that I speak of. How silly! Bit firmness of purpose attends me. This fulcrum of the San Francisco connection, while I await going on, affords reflection and repose. My dearest friends are now behind me; I have to go it alone. Nancy, Mike, Rob, Anthony await my return. Justin, Denver bound, left me an hour ago. I shall see him when I go in July to make my presentation to the Dabrowski Symposium. Just today, in this lounge, I received confirmation of my abstract to be published; yet another feather in the academic cap. But it does not fulfill me to do so anymore; I have reached the tipping point; I have spilled over into something else. Autonomy is not easy when one is physically dependent. But inner peace is. Yes?