Thursday, July 8, 2010

I Am Not Back to My Old Self

I was having dinner with a very dear friend of mine the other evening and we were talking about what has transpired in my life. I began to explain to him that I felt like I was back to my old self. He said, “Well...you’re not back to your old self because your old self sucks. You want to be better than that.” I pondered that for the rest of the night as we continued talking. I realized he was right. I am not back to my old self. My old self would be a set back to all that I have experienced and explored during this last leg of my journey.

I realized earlier this year that I struggled with anxiety and with the nudging of a friend, sought counseling to overcome my tangled thought life of vicious, circular thinking. This brought tremendous freedom. I was able to free my mind and emotions from circular thinking. Circular thinking is when you allow your mind to become overfly focused on one thought and spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to figure out a solution. I think too much and that may be an understatement. I have teased myself a few times that my mind is like a hamster on its running wheel. The downside is that I do not have just one hamster running on a wheel, but a herd of hamsters running, each on his wheel. And these hamsters are not fed conventional hamster food. They are actually sustained by Red Bull energy drinks in their water bottles and crack cocaine in their food dishes. Red Bull had given my hamsters wings and the cocaine had made them fly for days and nights without food and sleep.

Now the truth that we all must realize is that not everything in life has a solution – at least not one our finite minds can generate. Life should often be spent going with the flow, for if we fight the tide we will wear ourselves out and drown in the watery depths below. And there is freedom in going with the flow, of rolling with the punches. There were things in life I desired to have the power to exercise control over, that I wanted to have mastery over. Yet in the end, the real master was the circular thinking, and I was a puppet to it. Being a puppet caused me to lose my edge, my confidence. It felt as if my eyes generated a blank stare that led down the downward spiral staircase of my soul. And the truth is, none of us are in control. Yes, we choose what we will wear in the morning, the kind of car we will buy and drive, and what kind of cereal we will eat in the morning. But ultimately, there are the bigger issues in life that absolutely dig delineating from our 5 and 10 year plans, our social constructs, our desires…you get the picture.

But in this freedom, I learned a valuable lesson. You can travel too far in life and experience too much to go back to whence you came. I have lost some things and people I held very dear, and at one time thought if such things were lost my world could possibly come to a crashing halt. I was surprised when I found my world still spinning and orbiting. It is amazing to know that life does not stop, especially when you think your whole life could hinge on a handful of desires, people, or occurrences. And that is the blessing in life. Your world does not need hinge on anything. I have often told students I work with that our goal must be to have our lives revolve and orbit around God; that all the things we think are important in life must revolve around God and not God revolving around everything in our lives. The things we think are important in life are like planets that orbit the sun, and the sun is God. Planets orbit suns but suns do not orbit planets. I have a friend in Colorado Springs, CO who puts it another way: he says we should strive to bend our lives around God. I almost like the way he says it better. The reason being is that when he says, “bend our lives around God” I develop a mental picture of me hugging God so deeply and sincerely that somehow I stick and melt all over Him. I’m like a candy coating of sorts.

And in this process of trying to have futile mastery over instances in my life, trying to orbit God instead of God orbiting me, and striving to bend around God instead of God bending around me I have been encouraged to change many things about myself, some good and some bad. I made a lot of changes, some changes I really liked and some changes I resisted because I wanted to continue being me. Sometimes you can change unhealthily, enough so that you don’t recognize yourself. And when you change too much you die on the inside.

Dying on the inside is the most painful of deaths. You may have heard of the “heat death” the universe will experience trillions of years into the future. This is when all the stars in the universe will burn out, light will slow its pace across the universe, and eventually everything that is contained within the universe will die from freezing to death. The universe will literally be a frozen, inescapable graveyard to creation. In my opinion, a man’s ego is a universe unto itself. What is said to him will either make him soar or ground him to inaction. And when a man dies on the inside, it is like a “heat death.” It happens slowly, over a succession of time. It is not all at once, but slowly he retreats to inner caverns of cold with thoughts of self-doubt and abasement as the stars in his eyes burn out and his universe grows cold. I was dying on the inside at one point, and yet I did not utilize a way back.

I have a quiet nature about me and it is not always easy for me to express my goals and desires to others. Often in my mind I comprehend what I am doing but it is difficult for me to articulate that understanding. I tend to work in secret and not openly. I prefer to craft what I am doing before I make it public. It reminds me of the process of losing 140 pounds that I went through. There was a time when I would rise early three or so times a week at around 6am to run a few miles. There are not many people up at that time of day, so to me it seemed as if my process was a secret to the rest of the world. Sure, the rest of the world could not see my sweat or feel my aching muscles – they could see me shedding the weight, but they could not share my process. It is the same way for some of my hopes and dreams. I do not share those things with everyone nor can I always articulate it. And the best way for me to accomplish some of these goals is to be like a crocodile.

If you ever watch a crocodile that is floating through the water you will notice that it is mostly their head that is barely above water with most of the body concealed below the ripples. It moves slowly and its eyes look around at potential prey. Then, when you are least expecting it the crocodile strikes. You thought it was slow and lazy before, but in actuality it was deadly the whole time.

I am reminded of one of my mis-adventures in Ghana, Africa. I had walked out on a concrete platform to take my picture with a stone crocodile. I was riding the statue like a rodeo cowboy as the photos snapped, arm extended as if I was riding a bucking bronco. I was laughing as I stood up and walking back down the platform when I looked down and saw two crocodiles swimming towards me. They were moving quite quickly as they had chosen a target to hone in on, and that target was me! I am that crocodile. You know I’m in the pond, but you may not take my presence seriously. I am simply floating in the water as I wait and watch and ponder. But as soon as I hone in and find something on which to wrap my steely teeth...I would say look out...but it would be too late by then. I will stick to my strengths of quiet ponder and subtle movement. It will seem as if an overnight success flashed before your eyes when in actuality it took many years to happen.

I am reminded of the story of a quarterback who was interviewed by a reporter. She asked the athlete what it was like to be an overnight success. He responded, “If being an overnight success means ten years of slugging it out in the trenches while going unnoticed, then yeah, it feels great.” This QB’s words are true, at least to me, especially since we do not think of an “overnight” success with the athlete’s definition. This is true to me because I do not mind working quietly and honing my abilities. There will be a day when my abilities will come to a greater light (and maybe not, and that is fine as well, as it is not really about me), but until the day I am touted as an overnight success (even though it took many years), I will work quietly and obscurely.

There will be an overnight success to the Kingdom of God, even though it has taken millennia thus far to advance as far as we have. Isaiah 11:6 offers a futuristic look at the impending utopia we will experience in a fully realized Kingdom of God. The animals that once preyed on other animals will now be docile and satiated by other means as opposed to the previous desire for bloodlust. I, like many people, look forward to the day the wolf will lie down with the lamb, but until that one day comes, I prefer to be the wolf.

I am not back, and definitely I am not my old self. I am not back to where I started, as I have chosen to move forward beyond that point and mindset. If we believe it is God’s will for us to go “from glory to glory” (II Cor 3:18) and continue to move away from our original nature, that means that my old self sucks. Maybe I had a good run despite sucking, but I sucked nonetheless. This will remain true till the day of my departure to the next life. There is a fire in my eyes and a sensing in my gut that I am not who I used to be or once was. I am not solely the crocodile in the pond that moves slowly through the water, nor am I fully the dominating wolf of the overnight success that is yet to come. But I am the oncoming storm. Watch the clouds billow from a far off distance in the sky. See the lightning scream to the ground and ignite the earth with fire. Hear the roaring and crashing waves of thunder sojourn in emanation. I have no intention of being back to my old self, especially with an oncoming storm brewing.

(C) Aaron Brown, 2010

3 comments:

Jon Foster said...

Keep moving forward. Keep up the good work. Continue to follow him. I like it.

Anonymous said...

awesome blog. but it was hard to read with that type of back ground.

ken "friend of one with awesome calves" cotton

Brownie's Extrapolation said...

Thanks for the feedback Ken "with the nice calves." I changed the background due to your response. I kind of thought the same thing, but I didn't want to change it till someone said something.