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"It just goes to show you, it's always something - if it ain't one thing, it's another.
You either got a toenail in your hamburger or toilet paper clinging to your shoe."
--Rosanne Rozannadanna (Gilda Radner)
Something’s not right.
It’s amazing how many of us live with some version of that feeling.
Often the culprit seems obvious and we can easily identify that “something” – it’s problems with relationships, or work, or health.
Yet often there’s really no specific problem to point to.
There’s just this sense, anyway.
This uneasy feeling that wherever we are, we should be somewhere else. Whatever we’re doing, we should be doing something else. Whatever we are as a person, we should be something else.
If we speak up, we should be quieter. If we’re quiet, we should speak up more.
Something.
Quiet. Subtle. Nagging. A feeling that rarely goes away.
Which perhaps is why the fix-things marketplace is so huge. Perhaps it’s why therapy and meditation and medication and enlightenment searches and self-improvement are all so pervasive.
Because everyone’s trying to better something, enhance something, revise something. Everyone’s trying to attain something.
Usually several somethings.
And commonly those fixes involve a wholesale denial that anything about our selves could possibly be accepted as inadequate. “No I am enough! I am complete! Yay empowerment! Yay love myself!”
Trying to force a sense of enoughness which almost never feels true.
Because affirmations and positive-thinking approaches really only apply after we get enlightened or fix these many little flaws.
After we’re fixed, then we can say, yay us!
Proving that the idea that all is well does not in itself make us believe that all is well.
It feels off.
Because somewhere we know that improvement-thinking only perpetuates, reinforces, and even creates the sense of dissatisfaction with What Is.
So that even while we appear to try to fix not-rightness,
we are actually making more.
Leaving us stuck in unending circular dissatisfaction and seeking.
So, what if instead, we tried turning towards this sense of, “Something’s not right,” rather than trying to positive-empower it away?
Because pssst, that familiar sense of not-rightness could actually be correct.
It could be we know we’re pretending to be what we’re not.
It could be we know these selves are not what we are.
It could be that we feel the smallness of them everyday.
So that when we pretend we are important and we’re all that matters (which is always,) we ignore the vast, focus on the small, and then have the constant disquieting sense that we’re missing something.
We yearn to be part of a bigger whole, to be included, to belong, and to not miss out on anything. We yearn to be connected to all options, and to be all things.
While simultaneously insisting that being an improved, separate, individual is where it’s at.
Trying to have it both ways.
We feel the offness of this confusion. It feels wrong.
We feel wrong.
“Something not-right” becomes intertwined with the sense of Me.
Because the persona never fits quite right.
Turns out, that sense of “something isn’t right” has been true, all along.
Which is why so many, if not all, of us are familiar with it.
So rather than perpetually trying to fix what is actually not broken,
maybe we could try on a bit of acceptance. Just for fun and something different.
Because like it or not, approve or not,
we are What Is.
As is.
Yes, us.
And then quite paradoxically, we may start to see that we are enough- in all our incompleteness and smallness.
We may start to see that messed-up, incomplete Me is not wrong.
We may even come to see that “Wrongness” is right.
Making the familiar sense of, “Something’s not right,”
A gift
Which reveals us to be
whole, complete, adequate.
With all our imperfection.
Making us actually
very right indeed.
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"This thing that you are feeling is your own life."
--Alan Watts
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"Others have given you
Methods and ways
To achieve Oneness.
Is not the achievement of Oneness
Preconditioned on the assumption of
Two-ness, of Duality, of
You and not-you?
How can you merge with
What you already are?"
--wu'hsin
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