Take the inner change

Alternate title: What now?

Recently on the easel

Some metaphors are more obvious than others.

I was barreling down the highways that link my home to my family, barefoot as I always like to be when driving (unless it’s cold weather). I love feeling the vibrations of the road through the pedal, like I love soil on my bare hands when I garden.

Every time I go on any length of road trip, I appreciate the spiritual metaphor of the GPS. Constant, never shaming, focused on the best way to get to the destination according to your particular orientation, location, and preferences. I had already been thinking this every time it told me anything, when the familiar robot voice told me, “Take the inner change.”

Funny, I thought, I must have misheard that because of what I’ve been thinking.

But no, at least three more times as I took the interchange, I heard the mispronunciation clearly, emphatic as the voice likes to be:

TAKE THE INNER CHANGE.

I jotted it down in the little black notebook I carry to remember lines like this, and underneath it scrawled the question that’s been keeping me on track, rather than looping in the past or fretting over the future:

WHAT NOW?

It strikes me every time I go any place how the external environment can seem totally different but the inner talk can be the same. Call it the “wherever you go, there you are” phenomenon. You can be at home upset about a pile of laundry or at the beach upset because it’s cloudy. There’s the same dance with dissatisfaction and doubts, just on different subjects or themes. A change of location does not, in itself, adjust your focus for you. (Although it may dazzle or help distract you, for a bit, from your habitual patterns.)

When I catch myself ruminating on something I don’t want or like, or trying to forecast what will happen next, I bring myself back to where my power is, where my presence is, with that question.

WHAT NOW?

I don’t even need to solve for how. Just what.

The truth is, so much of what I think is me paying attention to the present is actually me thinking about something that’s just gone past, floating away in the stream, and I’m craning my neck to continue to watch it. At some point I figure this out when I start bumping into things in front of me, but asking “What now?” helps me notice it sooner. It audits my awareness and brings it back to where I am in this moment. (Which has just gone, and here comes another, and another…)

The truth is, NOW is closer to NEXT than not.

This is not to say that nothing goes with us that’s useful, that only new is good, that some echoes don’t linger or impressions don’t last--but it is to say that being alive is a constant state of checking in, finding which colors are alive for you and choosing those. Maybe it’s the blue you’ve always loved, or maybe it’s a peach that you’ve never liked before and may never like again.

(I’m falling into painting talk because I’d like to fall into painting next.)

I’m mixing my metaphors gleefully here, also like paint.

Driving with a GPS, canoeing in a river, painting a canvas … all of it sings in chorus the same insights in their own language. I remember getting chills in a chemistry lecture like it was church and tearing up at the same notes ringing through. This is what it is to be a mystic, I guess. Epiphanies can and will strike you anywhere, through any vessel or environment, because that’s the whole point.

Shall I drag out the original metaphor to the cheesy conclusion I made?

Here it is: I won’t truly be anywhere new unless I take the inner change.

I’d love to hear whatever’s lit up for you right now: Something old, something new? Something borrowed, something blue?

Let’s swap favorite rocks like penguins in the comments.

With love and bare feet (tucked under me in this coffee shop)