Auto Pilot

As I was quickly traveling from errand to errand last week, I noticed my stress and frustration levels increasing...

Why? Where did I have to be so quickly? What was such a priority?

I was on auto pilot.

I was driving to my destination without giving attention to anything beyond the traffic lights and my desire to get. there. now. But it was even worse than auto pilot because it was self-driven auto pilot, which is quite the oxymoron, but true nonetheless.

I am guilty of consistently self-driving the "need" to rush through a crowd, frantically search for the shortest line, or change lanes until I find my own bubble of space.

And then the world began to crumble.

And suddenly I went front noticing nothing to everything at once.

I noticed every single update to the news alerts at the bottom of the TV screen.

I noticed each time they updated the death toll.

I noticed every detail of the history lesson my husband was able to give me regarding these terrorists and the historic reasoning for each calculated maneuver they have and will make.

I noticed the way fellow grocery shoppers and I checked our shadows and were on a little bit of an edge in the parking lot that night.

I noticed an eerie silence in the world.

These realizations didn't suddenly point me to an a-ha moment about life--that would have been too trivial for this moment in history--but it did make me think a lot about fear.

Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love among many other things) captures fear in such a mindful way:

"[Pema] Chodron says, 'The older I get, the more I think every problem is just fear,' I feel like I'm seeing that too, because the questions that people come to me with seem to always boil down to some version of fear.

Some people feel "stuck" in life and fear making a change. Others practice a different brand of fear, masquerading as the desire to be perfect all the time.

It's what I call the haute couture, high-end version of fear... perfectionism.

Perfectionism is its own thing. It's also, 'I'm really scared of presenting myself in a way that doesn't look like I'm perfect.'

It's just fear in really good shoes, but it's still fear."

Perfectionism. Closed-mindedness. Self-righteousness. Ignorant Comfort. 

We all have our own fears that we face every hour of every day, but maybe if we start acknowledging that fear is what's truly at the core of all of these ideals, then maybe we'll have the chance to learn by listening rather than rushing to share our stories.

Here's to turning off the auto pilot of fear and tuning into conscious listening,


Kristy


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