Desire Means Doing, Not Trying

I think a fair amount lately about the idea of conscious unconsciousness. People that I meet who I trust to advise me all advise not to think, just to do, like my headstand teacher. Interestingly, my tarot card today advised the same thing, though phrased it in a different way, a thought-provoking way. It said: "Trying is not needed, only desire to do."

Wait a minute, I thought. I reward people all the time just for trying. What is this idea of not feeling it necessary to try, just desiring to do? Maybe, I thought, it is this same idea of conscious unconsciousness, this idea of not stopping to think and control and thwart intuition. Maybe it is simply important to be aware of desire and then trust that, if you're patient, you will be led down the proper path...Hmmm, interesting. Trying too hard, it turns out, can be a problem.

I have often looked back and realized, only in hindsight, that I got what I desired even though, at the time, I didn't really think, consciously, that I had. I have realized recently that I have designed my life in ways I could not have guessed I had any hand in. But, of course, I did. I just hadn't consciously tried, I had just desired. I feel like we all do that, it's just a question of if we look back and take responsibility, recognize our role in things turning out as they did, as they do.

Today, I gave out a slew of gold stars and my niece gave out a bunch too. It was the Day After, the relaxation after the build up to and completion of the Main Event. I love Day Afters. As my sister pointed out, though, so insightfully, the Day After could not feel so good if you don't have the Day Of. It is like trying to enjoy Apres Ski without skiing, not the same at all.

My immediate family all got the biggest stars for trying, each in their own way, to make it through the events without major mishap. Other family and friends got medium and smaller stars. If I could, I would buy all big stars, but they don't come that way. I have to see if I can special order, but usually I don't give out stars en masse. As I have said, they seem to lose their power that way, except on special occasions, like today, where most of those around me had played a part in the design of my life in obvious and not-so-obvious ways.

I never realized, for example, that the friends of my mom's that I most related to were New Yorkers. Only now, talking to them, does it occur to me that it might not be at all coincidental that I ended up in New York, having grown up in a new upstart city but having longed for the kind of roots that these friends talked about having had in New York.

"Funny," I said to an old family friend, now a Colorado resident but a native New Yorker, a one-time Tucsonan, briefly, but long enough to meet my parents, "Saturday Night Fever made me long for community of the kind that Brooklyn has in spades..."

"Oh, yeah, that was filmed in Brooklyn," he said. His wife and I were talking later, and she spoke of the days when she was in Tucson, homesick for New York, and how she watched Jack Lemon in the Out-of-Towners and loved it, how she would try to watch other New York-based movies.

"Not hard, since you realize so many movies are based in New York..." I said.

Between the New York-centric media and entertainment industries and the warmest people I ever knew coming from New York, it is no surprise that I am where I am, that my unconsious brought me to now, to life in Brooklyn.

Now, I don't mean to say that I will stop trying, that anybody should. But, maybe, if we trust ourselves and trust in what feels right, trying won't seem so taxing, so impossibly hard. Maybe our desires will be better fulfilled by relaxing and letting what feels good and nice wash over us and not putting up such a fight.