I recently had an experience with a child who passionately wanted something. He asked me once and I gave my answer, which was a yes, or a maybe, or a later, but definitely not a no. What matters most isn’t my exact answer, but what came after it. There followed, from said child, an onslaught of re-asking about why, when, how. His quest for details, for concrete and measurable information, was relentless. The rapid fire felt close to blowing a circuit in my mind. Being harangued to detail an event which mattered less to me than the present moment, was more than my brain could handle. At the time, I was consumed with other priorities, and his line of questioning threatened to veer me off course and back me into a corner.
I know that when what we want is denied, feelings of disappointment, resentment or injustice are natural. But when we’re promised what we want, it’s incredible how powerful our desire is for certainty, facts, timings. Whether working in the material or spiritual realm, a yes or no answer seems rarely to be enough. A lack of trust, fused with excitement and our tendency to forego the present either for the past or future, may be at cause. Or, it’s simply the result of living in an era where more information than we need is always at our fingertips.
Whatever the reason, it was in my moment with this child that I had a sudden insight into the noise that our guides likely experience when we incessantly ask for the same thing. Again and again and again. When we ask, even whilst knowing there are more important matters at hand. When we ask, knowing we already have an answer that should sate us. I heard, in my own small and highly frustrated way, the tiresome noise of a person who, having received the only available answer, would regardless continue to beg for more.
What’s important to take from this is not that ‘yeh, all children do that, they’re annoying’ but that the quest for more detail about the future can mean the current moment receives less attention, less focus than what may be required to enable that very future to occur. Think about driving from A to B. What might happen if you attempted to gather detailed information each time some new mechanical or electrical event occurred? If you were determined to know before you set out, how the car worked, and then during the journey you stopped each time you changed gears, pumped the brakes, turned a corner? If say, when you needed fresh air, you wanted to know and see the full explanation of how your window opened, how much more energy and time might the journey take?
Every time we need a conversation to be had again, every time we labour a subject, there is the smallest chance that not only are we pissing off the spirit realm, we may also be disrupting the process of achieving the very thing we are so desperate to attain.
There is also an element of control that however clandestine our tactics, we are absolutely trying to exert. By gathering all the facts we can about an outcome, the part of us that feeds on control will feel comforted, safe. This is serious stuff. There is a certain magnetism, or frequency that pulls our life towards us and vice versa. Too much interference in that stream of experience and who knows what is unable to traverse the waters to us.
There are times in life, pivotal and otherwise when, excuse the cliché – we have got to just be. We’ve got to accept the answer, shut the fuck up, and focus on the now. We’ve got to sit at the bus stop of life with no timetable and come wind, rain, sun, darkness, wait for the bus to appear. Who knows, maybe a limousine or a jet or a tuctuc will arrive instead. Our one job for now, is to stay rooted in our location and our frequency, so we can be found ready to receive, come what may. Sure, fear will have us do our best to check it’s not a steamroller or the wrong bus stop, but those checks need to be made mindfully and consciously, not on every occasion. For a pathological inability to surrender to an outcome, the advice is to investigate the part of you that feels so disconnected that it continuously demands facts over belief.
Personally, it is apparent motionlessness that gets me every time. Not being witness to obvious progress will set part of my body to jangling. Stillness, I am fine with, but pregnant pauses over which I have little control can feel irksome. Still, I have learned a further lesson here – one you can take too. This little child taught me to try harder, when planning my future, to distinguish between the search for more information and the fear of not knowing enough.
He also re-enforced that begging is really not cool.