Ah-Ha!
24. Week of September 12
Creating myself, I wake up to myself
Mid stroke the purpose revealed
Life strives on, and I strive on
Awake, revived, and healed
Aware, holding the fruit of desire
Forged from obliviousness, Will’s Fire.
In my creative work, I often think that I know what I’m writing about, or painting, or making up a song about…and then when I am finished - or sometimes right in the middle of creation - I suddenly realize, “Oh! This it what this piece is about!” It’s as if the lights come on and I can suddenly see, and often I see that my little creative thing is actually saying something much more than I had originally conceived.
This happens most often when I can allow myself to just move forward and work. It happens more often in my writing now that I have been a writer for many decades, because I have spent those decades writing. There are many hours of practicing, of developing the discipline to keep moving forward through the haze of “I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what I’m doing.” I try not to allow the not knowing to paralyze me (sometimes it does).
My students are learning their math facts. Some of them sit and whine - “I don’t understand! I know that 6+4 is 10, but what does that have to do with 16+4?” Well - you could count on your fingers and figure out that it is 20. Hmmm. And 26+4? And 36+4? Those who keep working suddenly sit back and say, “Oh! I see - it’s the next ten!” And then they can solve 36+24 with ease.
When we are becoming, we can’t see what we will become. The butterfly dissolved in its chrysalis is a soup. It has no idea (at least I don’t think it knows) where this process of transformation will end up, what will become of it. But it has to just keep moving forward and grow….wings?
A friend of mine recently expressed that sometimes whatever we are going through now is preparing us for something that we will need to do in the future. It is part of a larger pattern that we cannot yet see. We are learning the skills and developing the capacities that will allow us to do and be what we will need to do and be in the future. Just like those basic math facts, and the capacity to work the problem through even when they don’t understand the big picture, will enable my students to find success in high school calculus.
It is autumn, and the summer’s process of growth is manifesting a harvest. The pumpkin flower has become a pumpkin fruit. The purpose of all that growth and development becomes clear. We manifest this pattern over and over throughout our lives - working through not understanding to the Ah-Ha moment.
We might think that the fruit, the success, is the understanding. But I propose that the fruit, the gift of the process, is really the strength of will that we develop to keep on keeping on, to strive into the next looming unknown.