Better

I haven’t written in a long while.  No daily practice, no ten minutes a day.  No true sentence.  Why?  Because I’m afraid.  Afraid of going in deep, of digging out the truths, of what it takes to write that true thing again and again and again.

What I forgot was the result.  The gift you return with.  The diamond clutched in your sweaty hand.  Your face covered with soot.  Emerging from the cave.  The glint in your eye.  The knowing within.

The gift that transforms you and then, when you share it, those around you.

Instead, I hid.  Hid with excuses.  My life is going great, why screw with it?  The first two books were enough, look at what they’ve done.  I’m just a guy trying to figure his shit out, what do I know?  Look at all that I’ve learned, why not just stick with practicing it and be satisfied?

Excuses.

The truth is that I’m no longer the person who wrote those books.  I’m better.  Much better.  Because I wrote those books.  Because I shared what I learned.

There’s a deeper truth: better is not good enough.

For the longest time I thought that as long as I didn’t slide back to the depth of where I’d been, that was success.  Ah, monkey mind, you are clever.

The truth is that the experience of going within and sharing our gifts, they transform us.  We can never go back to where we once were.  We may slide, sure, but the person sliding is not the person who’d been down there before.

So the question to myself is: who am I now?  And start from here, from this point.  Dive in and find the new gifts.  And be better from here.

And that’s what life – from my current understanding – really is: a journey of being better and better and better.

I’m cool with that.