It seems as if I have spent my life waiting…

Waiting for those rushes of energy and emotion, of unadulterated experience that the universe always seemed to throw at me with such reckless abandonment; rushes so intense that I can’t think of anything but what is happening and everything else takes a backseat – almost as if I’m suffering from some sort of cosmic bi-polar disorder.

Athletes talk about being in the zone; about how everything else falls away as they slip into that moment where the only thing that matters is what they are doing here and now.  Musicians and artists too speak of this absorption.  I’ve experienced this myself with my writing.  The words just pour out of me as if someone turned on a tap and later, when I look at what I wrote I am in amazement.  I wrote that? Where did that come from?

I’m sure you’ve experienced those moments too…moments when everything seems to happen at once, and yet it is as if everything around you takes on a crystallized clarity as you focus on what needs to be done and thrill to the feel of the adrenaline coursing through your veins, to the power of the emotions and sensations stirred up in your blood. You have a purpose – you have meaning!  This is LIFE that is happening to you and you want to be fully there in every single second.

And then, when the moment is over, everything seems to STOP (or at least appears to stop in comparison to what you’ve just experienced) and you could swear that every movement you make is like trying to walk through molasses; so mundane and dull does it seem next to the heady rush you just experienced and you could cry at your loss, for after having experienced something so intense, how can you ever go back to living normally? How can you possibly work on the laundry after having just seen the view from the mountaintop?

But you do.  You come back to earth (so to speak) with a vengeance.  Indeed, after a while the intensity of the moment becomes nothing more than a vague memory; an anomaly that you remember with a certain nostalgia – until the next time it happens and once more you are thrown into the whirl of intensity that seems to affect every cell in your body.

And then there comes the day when you wake up and realize that it doesn’t have to stop.

No, this does not mean that you get to live in that cosmic high – in a never-ending rush of adrenaline and focused purposefulness (oh wouldn’t the corporate motivators love to get a hold of THAT sort of motivation for their employees!)

No.  What happens is that there comes a day when you realize that those moments of unadulterated experience are not just some random occurrence.  They are a choice.  They are what happens to you when you choose to bring your physical life into alignment with your soul purpose.  Those are your authentic moments – and they can last you for a lifetime.

You can wake up every day laughing in awe at the realization that each and every moment that you are experiencing contains that spark of awe; that crystalline clarity and sense of rightness.  When you realize this you will find yourself approaching each and every moment (even those that should, by all rights, be the most dull and mundane) with a sort of profound amazement at the potential that it contains; at the promise that it holds.

And it is then that the knowing will overwhelm you.

You are no longer waiting to live.

You are living.