Your Heart, Your Head and Your Backside.

I recently retired from a long and enjoyable career.  My eligibility for retirement came by surprise, one year prior to the date I expected.  I was excited to make some changes and have some new experiences, so I jumped at the chance.  The process took a couple of months.  I filled out the paper work and began to look forward to that exciting day!

 I also began to be miserable.  Miserable in a job I had long enjoyed.  My job entailed a lot of time driving.  Time to contemplate and consider.  After a week of unpleasant, expectant anxiousness about my coming retirement, I found myself pondering the cause of my misery.  Why was I no longer happy in my work?  Why had the fun gone out of it?  Why was I dreading going to work?   What was so great about this career that was somehow no longer there?  I wasn’t fearful of retirement.  I was looking forward to it with great anticipation.  The nature of my job had not changed.  My co-workers and customers would still be part of my life.  I had nothing to lose and much to gain.  Yet I was miserable and unhappy as I could be.

I considered my dilemma for days.  My mind turned to joy.  What are the essential requirements of joyful living?  What had changed so drastically as to take joy away from me?  I was at a loss.

 Then one day a little thought occurred to me.  That bud of awareness, nourished by careful contemplation, lots of writing (I always write as a means of discovery) and heart felt prayer, blossomed into a wonderful discovery!  Joy is contingent on one foundational principal:  You have to have your heart, your head and your backside in the same place at the same time!  I have come to believe that true joy can be experienced in no other way.

Each of us is essentially a trifold individual.  We consist of body, mind and spirit.  To be whole we need to balance our senses, thoughts and emotions.  That balance makes us complete.  Should our body dominate our mind and spirit, or the spirit, or mind do the same, we get out of whack and become incapable of experiencing joy.  Joy is the manifestation of wholeness and harmony in our being.

Driving down the road, miserable and joyless about my circumstances, I discovered that I had disrupted that harmony and wholeness.  My body was there at work in my vehicle, but I had allowed my heart to wander and had sent my mind on ahead to explore and anticipate my future.  I needed to bring myself back into oneness.  You see, joy can only be experienced in the here and now.  I had stopped living in the present, mentally and emotionally.  I had focused on the destination and hence stopped enjoying the journey.

In the next installment we’ll try to discover in better detail how to create that harmony.  How to keep our hearts, heads and backsides in the present.  For now let me just say, I managed to do it and for the final month of my career, I experienced more peace, contentment, fulfillment and joy, than I thought possible.