Giving up on Timelines by Toko-pa

 https://toko-pa.com/2021/07/23/giving-up-on-timelines/

Being in the humble practice of anchoring in my embodied present, where the tides of the future can be felt. By knowing them well, like a hermit crab in a tide pool, we can live in accordance with, rather than in resistance to, its sometimes violent changes.

As I mature on this path, I find I’m becoming less interested in timelines. I am moved by a different set of rhythms; the germination that refuses to be productive, the unplanned for breaking through a shell, the efforting push into the unknown, the coming into sudden awareness, the weepy stretching into a new size and space, the fruiting, the savouring, the commingling. Then, as cresting always declines in ambition into rest and letting go, the losses, the death, the enrichment, and a new germination.

When we perceive life through the construct of timelines, a lack of movement or even a setback will be seen as contrary to progress. But as you learn to see life in symbolic terms, you gain trust in setbacks as the concealed gifts that they are. Gifts whose benefits you can’t yet see because the future is still pulling you towards its horizon. Only when you get there will you realise the why’s of its rhythm. And even then, it may never make all-the-way sense to you, because you are just one organism-bundle in a grand choreography of elements dancing towards fate.