Goodbye to all that

Tomorrow I pack and leave a 23-year old marriage. It’s a relationship that has spanned 29 of my 44 years: a big chunk of my life. Why leave? To be free. To explore. To be alone in the universe. To learn to live this life in another way. To walk the road less travelled. To live unfulfilled dreams. To travel light upon the earth in a way that marriage and parenthood and others’ expectations haven’t permitted.

There are dreams of writing and travelling and living and working in other places, other countries. But most of all, I want to develop a relationship with myself that has eluded me. And to do learn to do this I must live apart and alone. I intend to devote myself to living a life a presence: abandoning ego and mind to live a life of consciousness, compassion, gratitude, joy, love and sacredness.

There is too much history where I now live. And too much future. By that I mean that I am haunted by the ghosts of a three-decade old relationship. I find myself being reminded too frequently of my failures, my transgressions, my sins. I’d like to believe that I am none of these things: that I am not my failures (or my successes). Yet looking forward, all I see is more of the same. I will not participate in the madness, the pain, the loathing, the unconsciousness any longer.

In the past month I have read and re-read Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. For too long, I’ve believed that my dysfunctional marriage was principally my doing, and that it was my responsibility to fix it. I’ve been told the same many times: as soon as I get my head together, our relationship can improve and prosper. Reading Tolle has revealed to me that the two of us have colluded in not speaking our deeper truth. That we have spent our time together mostly striking out and reacting from our unconscious wounded egos.

Now I see that I am not simply my little ego. In essence, I am something much greater and deeper. I am part of the life force of the universe. I am not separate. And I do not need to fight to protect my ego: my “boundary”: myself. “I am,” as Van Morrison says in The Waiting Game, “the brother of this snake.” I am connected to the flowers, the sky, the wind, the trees and the ocean. I am cosmic conscious dust and must die (before I die) to the fiction that “I think, (and feel), therefore I am.” If I keep believing and feeding my mind/ego, which lives on judgements and concepts and ideas and preferences and attachments, I am doomed to eternal suffering: sadness, anger and fear.

Goodbye to all that, As Robert Graves once said. Instead, my new mission is this: “I create a conscious world by living in the timeless realm of present-moment awareness.”