"Yeah," he said, "You told me that before."
Another time I told my friend John about an "Aha!"
"It's not about the "Aha!", he said.
What? It's not about the epiphany?
Right.
We all love those moments when things seem to crystallize. Everything suddenly makes sense.
But I realized this morning that there's a way in which the notion of epiphany outside of religion or science, epiphany as applied to daily life, is very 20th century. Or even older—it comes from Christianity, though many of us first were introduced to it in the writings of James Joyce. It is static. The problem with epiphany is a bit like the problem with memory: it's based on how you're seeing things at a certain moment. You're allowing some things into your field of vision, and pushing away others.
So we're not supposed to have insight? Great. Thanks.
No. Insight is fine. Just enjoy it without attachment.
John, like most of my friends, actually had more to say.
"It's not the "Aha!" that counts. It's the shift that happens in the moment before the "Aha.”
Good news: there are a lot more of those moments.
Making sense of things is important. Would you want a completely random life, a life without reflection? Probably not. Socrates was onto something: "An unexamined life is not worth living."
So we do need to take stock. And maybe that's a good way to think about it. Taking stock, or taking inventory, is about looking at available goods, what's on hand now. The concurrent assumption, which I guarantee will never fail you, is that things will change.
In the phrase, “Now I understand!", the operative word is “Now.”
©2012, 2013 Laynie Tzena.
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