If there’s just one thing…

If there’s just one thing I might suggest to you

it is to cultivate your capacity to suspend judgment.

If, as you read this statement your mind was set

racing with all the reasons why you should not consider

what is on offer then you are stuck

in what may be a foundational trap.

What does suspension mean?

Suspending judgment is not repressing your thoughts or emotional reactions. It is not a succumbing to Anarchy!™

Suspending judgment is simply to step-back and watch one’s reactions while at the same time realizing that there is probably more to what is being said than what a merely reactive mode will allow us to see.

Rushing to judge ensures that we will be stuck in the way we’ve always done things, felt things, reacted to things. I doubt many of us would consider this to be a good way to proceed if we allow ourselves to notice what happens as we rush ahead.

We are encouraged by just about any voice or outlet that has any carry in our current society to think and feel that nothing is more important than what we already know. What we reactively defend. This is convenient to anyone who is damaged and defensive enough and especially to those who have leveraged their fears and confusions into some kind of worldly success. The more broken this makes our society, our world, the more strongly they will advocate for doubling-down….

If upon hearing anything that does not immediately bolster our current view we cannot stop playing-back a long series of well-rehearsed either/or propositions that pit an unexamined sense of security-in-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it versus impending and certain doom because any other option we might consider is buried under an avalanche of an equally well-rehearsed worst-possible-case-scenario then two things happen:

We cannot possibly hear what is actually being said.

We can’t.

We’ve stopped listening.

It would be no worse if we just covered our ears

and started yelling,

“LA LA LA LA!”

Except that in that case

we might actually notice we are not listening.

And, we have stopped considering. I use this word instead of thinking, or feeling, in part because it is not expected. In part because it includes these others along with any possible way of actually relating to what is being said, what is going on, what-is. The loop of stock-answer what-ifs that flood our minds destroys our ability to consider anything.

This is a classic double-bind. If we were to listen we fear that all that we fear we might be letting in would destroy us. If we do as we’ve always done we ensure that we will continue to be as miserable as we’ve always been.

Repetition, over days, weeks, years, decades, a life-time and we are exhausted. We are sick unto death as Kierkegaard once said. We vibrate with anxiety. That is, we are stuck in a carrier signal of maniacal mechanical precision that precludes any sort of entry into living, breathing…, life.

“BUT!” Your habitual reflex insists on saying.

No, to suspend does not lead to any particular result. It does not condemn you to whatever worst-fate you fear. It does not bring your world, your self – if there is to be any meaning to the term beyond that of a shallow grasping Egotism – crashing to an end.

All it does is slow things down.

We all have a natural buoyancy.

If we didn’t have this capacity

bred into us by our half-billion years of life on earth

we wouldn’t be here.

This buoyancy and clarity,

an access to intelligence,

is available to us.

But only if we give it room.

This is all suspension does.

I heartily, gently suggest that you give it a chance….