Relations of Obstacles

Relationship Building

 

Which builds a relationship’s strength more – the ability to have a good time with someone or the ability to have a good fight with someone?

Faith & Hope: Daily Obstruction

Faith & Hope

 

Faith and hope are obstructions to life and impediments to radically saying Yes to all of life’s persnickety obstacles.

 

Daily Obstruction: Attention to Detail

Attention to Detail

 

When you know where you are and where you are going, you do it by rote.  When you get lost and find yourself in unfamiliar environs, you have to pay attention to right now.

Lost & Found: Your Daily Obstruction

Lost & Found

Getting lost is nothing more than finding you have arrived here rather than there.

 

Daily Obstruction – Amnesia

Amnesia

 

Have you ever arrived and forgot how you got there?  Life’s like that.

Daily Obstruction – Topography

Topography

 

Taoists like point out that when a rock obstructs the path of the river, the water, being soft and supple, goes right around the rock.  Buddhists point out that the river is the water and the rock.

 

Driven to Distraction – Your Daily Obstruction

Driven to Distraction

The more determined you are to arrive at your destination, the more distracted you are from the journey.

 

Daily Obstruction: Sisyphus’ Bag-O-The-Past

Sisyphus’ Bag-O-The-Past

Not all obstructions are in front of you.  Often the barrier to forward movement is the boulder you drag behind you.

 

 

Daily Obstruction: Liturgy

Liturgy

 

For some people at certain times in their lives, membership in a group, club, organization – you can read ‘religion’ here if you wish – is made more attractive the more selective it is.  The more odious, arbitrary, rigorous, and strict the rules, the more appealing it becomes.  Why?  For those  people at those times it is harder for them enter through the eye of a needle  than it is to go without obstructions.

 

Contracting & Expanding

Contracting & Expanding

1. Freedom – Very young children like the playground of pure imagination – being a pirate on a make-believe ship, imitating a lion, walking on the moonscape of the mind’s eye.
2. Law – Eventually they outgrow the mindscape of make-believe and prefer the playground of rules and roles – the grid of the football field, the confines of the basketball court, the complex strategies of board-games. The unstructured playground is “kid-stuff” to them now.  Fun is found within the rigid, bound, limits of the game. The imaginative mind has narrowed.
3. Liberty – At a certain point, the free play of imagination opens up to some. Second childhood.  They have discovered the “liberty” of creativity.  Liberty is freedom created by law: fiction emerging out of the innumerable rules of grammar, spelling, convention, etc.; improvisation arising from the rules of harmony, rhythm, dissonance, etc.; dancing galvanized by the bounds of physics.