Even The Word 'Obstacle' is an Obstacle, Episode 30
In this episode of 'Turning Towards Life' Lizzie and Justin talk about how our stories about what's happening can get in the way of our bringing ourselves fully into life. We consider how the very way in which we make sense of ourselves as 'having to get somewhere' with obstacles in our path that need to be overcome can throw us into an interpretation of life that's riddled with fear, resentment, and comparison. We wonder together what it would be to 'swim past obstacles without grudges or memory' and to understand life as an unfolding story that changes itself in each moment and with each action - and what new possibilities for freedom and contribution that can bring.
Our source is the poem 'Because Even the World Obstacle is and Obstacle' by Alison Luterman, reproduced with permission from the author. You can find out more about Alison at www.alisonluterman.net
Because Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle
Try to love everything that gets in your way:
The Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side and
whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be small
and swim past obstacles like a minnow,
without grudges or memory. Dart
toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking, Obstacle,
is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she’ll have that to look at the rest of her life, and
keep going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath underwater,
even though kids aren’t supposed
to be in the pool at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
may be a young man at a wedding on a boat,
raising his champagne glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.
He’ll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he’ll come up like a cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in service to the larger story,
because if something is in your way, it is
going your way, the way
of all beings: toward darkness, toward light.