TRACKING

The concept of "tracking" has come up a few times this week in several different forms. I went down to Salem, Mass. where I was born and lived the majority of my childhood years, to visit my mother who had a bad fall and is in rehab. It was four days of a return to being primarily a daughter. It was also the week Steve Jobs passed away. Tracking is a word that has fascinated me in the past...I 've written poems about it and fantasized being a student of Tom Brown tracking my authentic life in the tangle of earthly distraction. I admired a woman who wrote a book called Tracking...she was Australian and she walked solo across the continent of Australia with three camels who had their own ideas about the path they should take. The poem I wrote about Tracking was about stepping out onto a field of fresh white and virgin snow and making tracks fearlessly. On one visit with my mother, I arrived during a therapy session. She was working with the OT on tracking excersises. She has had a series of strokes that have weakened her left side and the left peripheral vision. On the paper, she had to connect small numbered circles from #1 through #25. The purpose was to strengthen her tracking ability. She struggled to complete the activity particularly with the circles that appeared on the left side of the paper. I watched and realized...it's really human to default to what comes easiest to us. What is easy is generally what is strong within us. We tend to avoid our weak areas but if we do so, we truly run the risk of living a lopsided life. We all desperately need to exersise and strengthen the very things we tend to fail at in order to lay track in our brains for a whole life. This is where conciousness and effort kicks in. Life invites us...in fact demands us to use our whole selves if we are to discover meaning and satisfaction in our short time on Earth. If we choose to use only what comes easy, we miss out. It is the shadowy, shy...wild , uncivilized part of ourselves that we need to somehow invite out to play...we need to strengthen and educate and love the part of ourselves that is the most inept, unbecoming, unpredictable and uncooperative part of ourselves. If do do only what comes easy, we set ourselves on a circular track and we go round and round wondering why it is we always return to the same challenge. Steve Jobs gave a talk several years ago to a class of college grads. He talked about doing what you love...trusting your intuition and following your own dream as opposed to fullfilling someonelse's set of expectations for you. He talked about connecting the dots...but that that tracking must be done in hindsight. You have to lay down the dots of your life by living it and finding the track...finding the pattern...learning to make sense of it all comes in the looking back, not in the looking forward. As I listened to him give his talk...I thought about my elderly Mom lying in the hospital connecting dots for the OT. I think about my own journey of life on this planet. Sometimes I get bogged down in trying to sense the sense of it all...trying to analyze and understand the whys and wherefores. I imagine that I can make my life whole and complete by bullying myself into change. Yet as I talk meanly to my self in ways that I'd never speak to anyone else thinking I might create a motivation for positive movement, I believe I am immobilizing myself with self loathing. Instead, I should be treating myself like my aging Mother...gentle...respectful...calm...knowing the whole picture will be seen eventually. If I want real change...I need to lay down a new track like a bridge over chaos and depression and ineptitude. I need to notice my strengths and exercise my weakness...not hide them under the rug. One needs to be a child at some things. A beginner. A fool setting off on a journey the world considers foolish. Steve Jobs spoke concisely and clearly about it all in that one speech he gave at Stanford. Listen to it. Listen to your inner self and then stop critisizing and labeling and sabotaging yourself...and just do it. A sacred moment can happen anywhere...at any time. But it cannot be forced or contrived to happen. The prayer and the prayed for open in their own time like a flower opening...from the deep inner timing of it self and not before. If you want to travel the track of the positive...you have to lay it down first in your brain and in the way you talk to yourself and encourage yourself. Choose not to bully yourself. Choose not to believe in the negative self talk. Choice is everything. And it is the only real power.