by Katherine Mayfield

This week, I feel like I’m living in a blender. Everything is whirling and twirling in a messy goo of missed appointments, half-baked emotions, unexpressed desires, and fretful annoyances. I bend uneasily under the heavy weight of my calendar, stumbling from one task to the next, while the clock continues tsk-ing out its count of the seconds I no longer have available to get too many things done.

The creatures on my to-do list are whining with dismay at having been left alone too long, each one moaning louder in my mind when I attend to another, in the hopes that it will become the next accomplishment.

And the accomplishments slide under my feet like a muddy, uneven treadmill, sometimes so fast that I don’t even notice; and while the accomplishment treadmill chugs tiredly onward beneath my feet, the guilt-for-not-getting-enough-done movie plays over and over in my head, following the endless dog-eared loop that circles around the head of nearly every average American citizen.

The world is tilting, and I feel as if everything is about to slide off – all that I think I know about myself and life is sliding sideways into a huge confusing jumble of mistakes and missteps and misunderstandings, pushed over the edge by the scorekeeping judge. 

I look at the sodden heap of what I thought I knew, and the sigh that starts in my brain glides steadily down to my toes.

Perhaps spirituality is not always about reaching for the clouds or finding inner peace. Sometimes it’s about scrabbling down into the dark earth of life, coping with the Blender Effect without resistance, and knowing that everything will, in the end,  turn out okay.

--Author and actress Katherine Mayfield blogs on spirituality and other subjects.