The Pond

“Many drops make a bucket, many buckets make a pond, many ponds make a lake, and many lakes make an ocean.”

-- Percy Ross

There are times that I feel completely clogged up. Where my brains and my emotions feel like a sinus infection of the worst kind. Most times ideas, thoughts, and feelings are running around in my head, bouncing off each other, jumping up and down or just doing all kinds of active, metaphysical calisthenics.  But that is when the sheer volume of them is at the noise volume level of a pop song. Not the speed metal that it sounds like lately.

Compare my normal mind as existing in a gaseous state, lots of room between thoughts, and light and mostly transparent. But things change as those gases start to liquefy with too much sensory input until this thickening turns my thinking into a solid, immobile mass of worthlessness. All those electrons slowing down and molecules contracting, growing closer together and the space between them growing crowded until my thought process starts to turn into a substance similar to cold lard.

The only thing to do at this point is to bucket out the pond. And there are a lot of things to bucket out dwelling in the murky waters of the pond that is my brain. It seems no matter how many things get crossed off my list (unwritten down, of course), more things stand up and shout out to be added. I realize there are always unexpected things that will rise up to be dealt with but how can I add them to my life without disrupting the gentle flowing pace I wish to exist in?

I commented to my wife that I was beginning to understand why people went and lived in monasteries. How the would choose to get rid of everything and throw on the hair shirt, grab the Rosary Beads and turn their back on the rat race of human existence. On the other hand, I don't want to leave everything about my life behind even if I could take my wife to the monastery. Especially after she told me that they let you walk in the woods around the monastery. At least that was her experience at the retreat she returned from last month.

I like that.

But I also love the wind when I ride my Triumph motorcycle, the river banks slipping by while I am in my kayak, old car grease on my hands as I work, and meeting the wide array of people while I travel for my job around the countryside.

So I will have to look in every pail full of pond water as I bail, making sure of what it contains. Make sure that the evil, anger, fear, doubts, and negativity are in there. And making sure that the joy and the wind and the sunshine don't get tossed on the banks with them. The process may leave a few bad things swimming around in there but at least there will be some room for both the good and the bad to recognize each other and give the space needed to do the right thing without paralyzing all the pond life.

"The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives." --Unknown