Once upon a time on a cliff

by Paul Smetana
(Wollongong - Australia)

There are times in life where a sense of ALIVENESS is none too close. Those times are painful, full of suffering and the urge to shake off these feelings and thoughts are so powerful, that strange things can start to happen. Don’t worry, this is a good positive piece, full of life affirming possibility, … just stay with it, I’m getting there.

People get fidgety, they also get sick, when aliveness is far away. But mostly they go into shock. The reason is that pain and suffering are not natural states of being, but fantastically, we have this amazing capacity to side step these kinds of intrusions.

Humans have survived for so long now. We have lived through every kind of nonsense, Calamity and attack. We have been able to do it because we can bypass, deny, look the other way, reinterpret, and fanaticise. We have found many ways to make life work for us despite all this storminess.

Shock is one of the big ways that help us. Is that shocking? Shock takes you away from all the pain. You become confused, disoriented, and dulled to it all. You’re unable to take it all in. You will look the other way. Shock can be good … IN THE SHORT TERM!

In the long term shock can wipe out your brain, give you something else to focus on instead, like an illness, or a condition. Shock and it’s use of diversion can lead you into such a uncertain way of living, that you get no time to reflect on the loss of Life in your life, which is the point.

It comes to pass for everyone to experience that moment on the cliff, where full aliveness is. It’s often at the end of a long dark despairing episode, that a wave of what it is to be fully alive, comes to you. What will you do then? What have others done?

Sometimes you hear of being “born again”, this is one of those moments. It’s not religious. At least not in the usual way of thinking about it. It’s a moment where Aliveness comes flooding in. What you do at that moment is crucial. This is the standing at the edge moment.

IF you let it go, look past it, ignore it, it will go away, then you go back to the “dulled Life”. But if you embrace that truly miraculous moment, your life will start to take off as you would have never believed.

There are times where this experience happens. Retirement is one, … and a big one, perhaps the last big cliff moment we get? This is the time where the full experience of all you have ever been, meets all you could possibly be. At this point, people either decay into frailty, or they bloom into explosions of wonderment and mystery.

I think, all through life there are these “Cliff moments”. Like Spring after Winter. Going from childhood into adulthood could be one of those.

Certainly adulthood as we know it, rarely turns out as good as it is promoted. All the goods and services and infrastructure, we have in our affluent times, seems to do us no good at all. Recognising this salty and abrasive fact, is usually a dark time of the soul, a real cliff hanger. Get it? Small joke, to lighten the mood.

At the adult onset of the cliff, what will you do? Go into shock and dismiss it thereby, or a much better idea, let it fill you with as much aliveness as you can stand, and keep asking for more.

Your life will take off in many mysterious ways. You will feel good so often that you might begin to wonder why this life affirming ALIVENESS isn’t apparent to others. Being ceaselessly filled with LIFE is natural, although for us in much of the world, it isn’t normal.

Embrace the cliff then, it’s the only way to glow. Get it, not go, but GLOW!