Now you can't keep suffering from happening but you can develop something to blunt the force of the blow.
I'm not talking anything new here.
Ever heard of the poem "If"
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn
Long after they are gone.
And so hold on when there is nothing left in you
except
The will which says to them
hold on.
I am quoting Rudyard Kipling to draw your attention to the fact that
after all is said and done,
after all is spent
Spirit is what says to them hold on.
I think spirit is the divine spark or the plural of soul.
I think its infinite and consequently the most powerful force in existence.
It's what started everything and it's what we all have a piece of.
Buddha found it.
Jesus proved where it came from.
Gandhi kicked the crap out of the British with it.
The Washington Redskins are searching for it.
Why, might you be asking, am I bringing the Redskins into this conversation?
I think Spirit is easily recognizable during intense violence and American Football is a violent sport.
My soul is tied to the success and failures of the Skins. I believe my support blends in with the overall spirit of the team. With me, and more importantly, each player, believing in a positive outcome maybe our chances for winning go up.
I think of it like this: a single cell is to my body, what a single fan is to a team.
Anyway, in my mind the culmination of personal battles taking place on the field represents the strength of the spirit of the team. The strength of the spirit of the team is what influences the ball to bounce one way or another. In a sense this makes spirit beyond control, however some teams are clearly more connected to it than others.
I'm talking about all this spirit and football stuff because the way the Skins lost to the Broncos, last Sunday, broke my spirit. I wasn't pissed about the loss,
I was crestfallen.
I liken our butt kicking, that began in the third quarter, to the image below.
Pathetic, I know.
All the women I know can't understand it. The wiser men I know have kinda transcended it, but most football fans I know are tied to their team by much more than entertainment.
I like to imagine this aspect of myself comes from my ancestors who rooted for their warriors because their success meant the communities' safety.
Football being such a successful sport is testament to the health of that warrior spirit.
All fine and good but the experience of my suffering sucked......
It sucked right up to the point our young quarterback, RGIII, held his weekly press conference.
RGIII is presented as resting his strength with God, Family, and hard work. Currently his ability to lead the team is in doubt because we are not winning. The pressure on him is enormous.
After giving the right answer to every question he was asked, he very simply explained that getting one's ass kicked in epic fashion
is a
Test.
Plain and Simple.
Back to the beginning, protecting yourself with wealth, asthetics, ideas, anything other than spirit is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
So I'm beginning to understand.
Bottom line:
Suffering,
getting your butt whipped so bad that
you forget your name
is as bad
as the time it takes for you to remember what you might actually be.
Spirit is the True shield
As a single cell of my body is to me
So
maybe
My soul is
To
God.
Talk about protection.
This post was guided by the 86th stanza of the Art of Peace, a book written by Morihei Ueshiba
Armor Down has a website. Check it out.
Tame the Mind
Train the Mind
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