Sick of Summer

I've been irritable lately and not feeling very well. Someone commented recently that I didn't look like I felt very well and I replied, "No, I haven't been feeling well...maybe I'm just sick of summer!" She laughed. However, this time every year I'm truly fed up with the oppressive heat. I am so hot natured that whenever I'm in a group and someone asks me whether I think it's too cold, my response is always, "I'm the wrong person to ask." If it's too cold for me, then it is likely that everyone else in the group has died from hypothermia.

I can get down on myself when I'm so bitchy and I wish I weren't. However, the reality is, at least at present, that I'm a good deal away from perfect or serene or whatever the illusive state of being is that I seek, and I am all too frequently confronted with the reality of me. During my life I have often watched, with some wonder, people who seem to be so utterly sure of themselves and their own reality. I so constantly question my own assumptions about myself and my perceptions of the world that the older I grow the dumber I feel.

My only comfort is that in terms of spiritual growth, which is utimately what is meant by personal growth, that knowing ourselves is the greatest confrontation and task. Even as a young child I remember asking my mother how one knows when God is commanding one to do something. I had been told the story of Abraham being instructed to kill his son and, I reasonably asked, "What if God tells me to kill someone?" A very legitimate question. My mother, who I know now was but a youth in her own right, was disconcerted and admonished me that God would never tell me to do such a thing.

I was not then assuaged and I am not now. Even a cursory following of the news rapidly reveals how many of us humans in the name of our respective religions vow that we are only doing God's will. I've never been certain about how I can separate my own human egoistic aspirations from that of the purity of God's will. I'm not that trusting of my ego. I am even sometimes jealous of others' seeming certitude.

Yet I must join The Mother in her jest of such human frailty when she shared a joke about the same subject:

"You know the story of the irritable elephant, his mahout and the man who would not make way for the elephant. Standing in the middle of the road, the man said to the mahout, "The divine Will is in me and the divine Will wants me not to move." The driver, a man of some wit, answered, "But the divine Will in the elephant wants you to move!" (March 14, 1951, The Mother, Questions and Answers 1950-1951, Volume 4, page 208)

I'm continuing to try to get out of the way of the Divine Will and life goes on.