DISRUPTION AND DESTINY

I am allowing this time of disruption to lead me to a greater destiny.

How about you?

I have lived through countless disruptions to the individual and collective status quo. They have varied in intensity and in duration. For most of my existence I have at best tolerated these disruptions, awaiting the time when I and we could just get back to normal.

Could we please just get back to normal?

Though I have lived through countless disruptions there has never been one quite like this. There has never been one with such sustained intensity. Never one that literally involved the entire human race. This has been and continues to be in many ways a great equalizer. We are globally being disrupted and disturbed. Death and illness surround us in a collective shroud. People are screaming out “could we please just back to normal?”

I am not one of those people.

For me, this disruption is purposeful. Not logically and certainly not punitively. We have collectively been participating in a fate that was unsustainable. Disturbances and dramas were playing out in unmistakable ways. Divisiveness has become a cancer. Greed and immorality have been eating away at the truest of what human beings are capable of. People have been demeaning and dehumanizing other people on full display in our social media culture. Name calling is visible and audible in a nanosecond. Caste systems have been reinvigorated by the so-called powerful and unbelievably tolerated by the masses.

It was beyond time to disrupt that toxic reality.

I have no desire to return to that state of what had become normal.

I in no way deny the devastating consequences of this pandemic. I see, hear, feel the collective pain. It was made very personal for me by the death of my best friend from this rampant virus. I compassion all those who have lost so much directly and indirectly as a result of this mass disruption. I have remained awake and available to anything and everything I may contribute to help alleviate this quantum level of suffering. I do not know when it may end or even ease. But rather than just riding out this disruption I am seeking to glean every bit of lesson I can as to how I may let this disturbance lead me to a greater and more serviceable destiny.

I cannot and will not go back to where we or I was before.

I firmly and wholeheartedly believe disruptions can lead us to a greater reality if we let them. I have seen it numerous times during my lifetime. When I have been stuck in patterns that had run their course and were no longer fruitful life has disrupted those patterns by stopping me in my tracks. Admittedly I was most often disturbed by the disruptions. I did not like being stopped. I frequently pushed hard against the disruption, which only dug me deeper into the hole of my own resistance. Though the patterns had led me to suffering the suffering was familiar and so oddly comfortable. It has only been in perhaps the most recent decades that I have come to feel a sense of possibility in the disruptions of my life. I have come to embrace disturbance as part of emergence. I have begun to release patterns and relationships that I amazingly did not leave claw marks on.

With the broadest of brush strokes, I would say that this pandemic is a tragic out picturing of our collective fate. We have contributed to it individually and collective, consciously, and unconsciously. And if this pandemic is fate, then it can become destiny. But any desire or push to go back to normal must be sacrificed.

Fate is what happens. Destiny is what we choose to do with it.

It is my fate to be alive at this time of disturbance, disruption, and distancing. I am very clear about that.

It is my destiny to relate to all of this in wakeful, faithful, and even grateful ways.

I truly and deeply believe that not only is it not prudent to try and return to the unsustainable past, it is impossible. That normal is gone. It needed to die. It needed to be disrupted. It needed to be stopped. And people of destiny will spend this time looking deeply at our own internal dramas. Our own self-imposed disturbances and divisiveness. How we treat ourselves and how we treat others. How we may dehumanize and denigrate. It has to stop.

It has to stop, and we have been stopped.

I am choosing to welcome and even celebrate this disruption. I have no need to return to anything. I have a profound desire to surrender to a deeper unfolding that is tangibly happening within me. I have no idea what my life will look like on the other side of this massive disturbance. And I feel no need to know.

I am certain of little in life anymore. Yet I am oddly certain that uncertainty is always a friend and never a foe. I am certain that in many ways my life will now be lived from a clear demarcation of before and after Covid-19. Before and after a global and horrific disturbance. Before and after the time when my fate clearly became my destiny.

I will either consciously use fate or fate will unconsciously use me.

I have lived through enough disturbances and disruptions to know that how I relate to this fate will lead me to a greater destiny. I do not deny being disturbed. I am not deadening nor am I identifying with it. So, the disturbance is available and usable. My former way of being has been disrupted, and a higher and more wakeful expression is emerging. And that higher and more wakeful expression is my destiny.

I am letting this profound disruption lead me to a greater destiny. I am moving forward from that. I do not wish to return to anything that was before. I do not know where this disruption will lead. I only know I am being led.