128. Dating in ‘bewilderment’ is much simpler than striving for ‘control’

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion,
bewilderment intuition.
~ Rumi

I saw this quote this morning in an online newsletter I get and it reminded me again how reluctant we are to give up control. “Buy bewilderment” the famous spiritual poet of the 13th century says. What’s that mean?

Many of the spiritual teachers I’ve known and read say words like, “Be willing to live in the unknown.” In other words, be willing to just relax into bewilderment, the place where you have no control.

Often, as I’ve dated in my 60s and now into my 70s, what I’ve noticed is that people suffer a lot because they think they can be in control. What Rumi is saying is not that you use an act of will to live in bewilderment but that when you see that your true nature is just BEING you also see that there’s no ‘one’ to have that opinion he speaks of. Without an opinion ‘you’ simply relax into ‘what is’, which is simply watching life unfold -- in bewilderment and an easy contentment

Another way of saying all this is to use the word ‘judgment’. Judging is trying to be in control. When our date or partner doesn’t do what we want, we judge her and say she should do it ‘our’ way. When the government doesn’t operate the way we want, we judge it and say it should be done ‘our’ way. Have you ever noticed that judging and having an opinion makes us suffer in some way? It may be slight, but there’s not an open, relaxing, loving welcoming of life when there’s judgment and opinion.

Dating at this age in life can really bring our judgment to the fore can’t it? It’s easy to think we’re running out of time and we want a partner before we die – and we want him NOW! But when we look into it we can see that our wants of the past often haven’t been met. When they were, it was luck, like winning at a slot machine. We get our way just often enough to think we’re in control.

There’s a lot of stress in trying to be in control and push life (including our dating partner) around all the time. Whenever something doesn’t go our way we think of it as a problem, and then we try to fix it, usually by wanting to change the other person. But what if our dating life or our dating partner is just the way it is, for no reason other than it just is? If we saw life that way we could live simply in the wonder and ease of bewilderment. There’s a great joy and love in that. If you wonder about that just close your eyes for a moment and picture your life if you simply saw everything as it is, without your opinion and judgment. You’d simply be living in the mystery and bewilderment of this moment. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? You can have it – now!

Copyright © 2006 Chuck Custer