I was working security – polite-speak for ‘bouncer’ – on New Year’s Eve, years ago. It was a bash at a large four-venue plaza in the downtown of a large city a few hours’ travel from my own city. I worked part time for this security firm and they didn’t have enough workers to cover all their gigs that night, so I grabbed a handful of guys from my karate club, gave them a crash course on the security job, and we traveled to the venue and joined dozens of other security workers.
We were divided into four groups to provide security for the four venues, and I was in the group of about fifteen chosen for the plaza’s night club. Things were normal – for a night club – until exactly ten minutes after midnight, just long enough for the champagne to kick in; and then the frenzy began. From 12:10am onward was probably the most exhausted and scattered I’ve ever been. It’s like every young man with bleached and spiked hair, too much cologne, and a few muscles, showed up to fight. Very loud music, people vomiting on the floor, things being broken, and… fights.
We’d be wrestling one guy to kick him out – I mean, escort him out – the club’s back door, and on the way there we’d see another fight break out and we’d take note of where it was so we could get back to that new one. We’d jump on that one, and another would start. We worked mostly in pairs, though sometimes we’d have to split and work alone, there was so much to do. We worked with radios but had to ditch them, with fights everywhere we were all tied up and there was no point in calling anyone for help.
And it wasn’t done ‘cleanly’, either. I’d be wrestling, pushing, pulling one guy to the door, and one of his buddies is yanking at my arm, another buddy on my other arm, one on my waist, I’d have to leave the first guy because yet another would have his arm around my neck, choking me off. So I’d have to let go to shake these other guys off and yell at them, shove them, then push back to the original guy to get him out. Then run upstairs where some guy was sitting in a bloody daze because three guys had broken a chair and some glass over his head. Then back downstairs and across the room to a fight, then to the washroom for a quick pee, where some guys came in and recognized me as a bouncer and yelled and cornered me… well, there’s much more, but you get the picture. The club finally turned on the lights early, due to all the damage and problems, and a mob was yelling and surging against the coat room and finally knocked it over into splinters.
A couple hours later the security groups from all four venues met in the control room for food and debriefing. The other three groups are all looking at us; they’ve had a pleasant uneventful evening, providing security for quiet and formal crowds in the dinner theater, the ballroom… and we night club guys are sitting there with bedraggled clothes, dripping sweat and mussed hair, blood spatter all over our clothes. Try doing that for a couple hours in your life, in the dark with disco lights strobing all around, very loud night club-volume music, yelling, fights, vomit, crowd so thick you have to push to get anywhere all night. I was breathing so hard I was gasping, could hardly lift my arms because they were so tired and sore from picking people up and wrestling them out the door. We literally could not count the fights. We tried. In all the gigs I did security at, that was the only one even approaching that bad.
What is the point of this story?
That time, and many other times in my life, I’ve been in the middle of circumstances and people that were a mess, and which muddied my head into a very unclear state. Surreal, frightening, confusing, unpleasant, not sure what to do or how to get out of it. Sometimes a large buffet of circumstances, rather than just one, arise and converge all at once, and we feel we’re caught in the middle of a tornado.
You have experienced these circumstances also. Some of them were all-consuming and you became lost in them, others were milder, but the circumstances were mixed-up enough for you to lose your clear thought within them, your sense of who you are, your balance and equilibrium. During these times, whether extreme or benign, our thoughts become fuzzy, surreal, disjointed and disconnected, everything seems so unclear. We go into ‘just operate’ mode, rather than clear thinking mode. How do you escape, what helps to make it better, how do you work it out, what is the answer, what do you grasp at to bring things into some semblance of clarity again?
BE CLEAR WITHIN THE UNCLEAR
We each have clarity already within us, even within our times of unclear mind. It is an isolated, protected, and ever-present clear awareness we can tap into whenever we want, even while our thoughts are churning in the violence and haze. Even while we’re drunk, on drugs, exhaustively tired, stressed, enraged, panicked, despairing, screaming…
…There still resides at the center of our minds an empty, quiet, aware, clear center of presence, a mindfulness that is conscious and watchful, watching the mess as it happens and witnessing it with peaceful knowingness. It is there in all of us, but we don’t all use it. More often, during cloudy circumstances, we become lost in the confusion, become merged with the dramas, carried along within events we seem to have no control over.
But you do not have to lose yourself. There is some small percentage of energy within us reserved especially for clarity. Most of us never consciously realize it’s there, never purposely tap into it, and that is why so many people seem to lose themselves to rage, to terror and panic, to frustrations. Most of us haven’t learned that no matter how upside-down things can become, we can always tap into this gift of watchful clarity.
I look back even to when I was a child, and realize that whenever things happened that confused or panicked me, I would search somewhere deep inside, search for a quiet clarity. Over my lifetime I’ve watched people freak out over many things, from injuries to death to excitement to fear and frustration… and I have done some of that as a child. But as I grew into young adulthood, even when I was panicked inside there would be some clear awareness behind that panic, looking at what’s going on. I would have some sense of presence and control, even while I was ‘losing it’.
It is not a thought, not a way of thinking or calming down your emotions… it is an awareness. A quiet awareness, which you have no control over. You can have control over your thoughts and emotions and allow them to get out of the way, make room for that clear awareness to be experienced, but you and I can have no control over that clear awareness itself. It is always there in you, and the only thing you can change is how clearly you are listening to it, tapping in to it, while the shit is happening around you and to you. All we can ever change… is how much of our thoughts we can ‘get out of the way’ so we can let this calm clarity do its work.
When you are not consciously aware of this clear center, you’ll feel like a mess during confusing events, and afterwards. Once you begin to become consciously aware of this full-time clear awareness patiently waiting within you, you will begin seeking it, returning home to it over and over as events threaten to steal your calmness, certainty, sanity. Giving way to it more and more effectively and more often, will over time sculpt you an iron-solid and beautiful presence, even within the tornado of your life. Sanity within insanity. Control within chaos. Unity within discombobulation.
Events arise daily – hourly – to befuddle us, to thwart our wants and comforts. Even right now, the simple writing of today’s tool: tonight I felt like writing down another of these mind tools, but I didn’t know which one to choose to write about. I am house sitting one of my favorite homes again, up in the hills. I like to jump in the hot tub at night, look at the stars and hills, and think. I had been outside with the dog an hour earlier, the sky was clear, starry, so I looked forward to sitting in the tub with the gorgeous view, thinking over which tool I’d scribble out in bed and spend tomorrow typing it out.
An hour after being out with the dog, I again went outside, to prepare the hot tub… and it is snowing. No… it is dumping. The ground is already covered, I can’t see the sky or the hills, or anything, clearly. And tomorrow, instead of typing, enjoying writing on these tools, I’ll be sweaty and sore from shoveling snow at these three different places I’m house sitting. The clear view and stars that help me with clear thinking… gone. The relaxing day tomorrow, writing on these tools that I enjoy so much… gone. Thoughts immediately become riled, disappointed, upset. My mind is immediately missing the circumstances I had looked forward to and wouldn’t have, and damning these new circumstances that I do not want.
So I let my wants dissolve, go away. I stopped wanting the clear sky and peace. I let my mind calm down and accept the new, the change into what I do not want. The dissolving of wants and plans, and the allowing of today to be whatever today is, and tomorrow to be whatever tomorrow is. And I allowed whatever clarity could arise within the claustrophobic, fogged-in snowy white-out. Immediately the phrase arose:
BE CLEAR WITHIN THE UNCLEAR.
And that was it, everything became okay inside me. I had been aware of this tool for a long time, used it often, but had not given it a ‘title’ yet. The title and details dropped into the hot tub with me alongside the thick clumps of snow plummeting all around me from up high in the night. So I looked at the falling snow that had been annoying to me moments before, and said Thank You.
The snow pushed my own plans aside, and I was able to let them go and tap into my clarity… which then gave me the gift of the writing of this tool tonight. It happened organically with what was happening to me at the moment, which is how I like to let all these tools be written. When I stopped wanting the clear circumstances and just let circumstances be what they were, and allowed my own clarity to arise within the unclear night and weather around me, my mood aligned into perfect order. Instead of having to ‘think out’ and ‘force’ which tool I would write, the next tool was literally thrown at me, snowed down upon me, given to me to write, right now. I gave up wanting what I thought I wanted. And when I’d given it up… it was tossed into my lap.
This works on all levels. Your happenings might be as sedate as mine, or you might be in prison, in torture, in illness, in despair, in some place that you have no control over and which you can never seem to escape. If you cannot escape it, then what is the one thing you can count on? You can count on your own inner clarity, your own presence. And that’s it. It is always there, you can always count on it, you just need to learn how, and keep doing it.
The more often, and efficiently, you remind yourself of your ability to tap into your clarity even amid the unclear, the more often you will be, and feel, clear. You will expend less energy and time, experience less frustration and rage, because you will let go of trying to force changes, to force things to happen. Instead of assigning so much of your life’s energy to changing external things that cannot be changed, you’ll spend more time listening to what’s happening inside your own skin and acting in accordance with that listening.
Then you will notice that the events in your life will start unfolding more perfectly and organically with each other. The tornado will still happen at times in your life, there will be times you simply cannot escape upsetting, messy situations. But you do have the option of tapping into your essence, your own clear presence, even during those harsh situations; and your inner clarity is so powerful that even if you can genuinely tap into it just a little… it will alleviate your suffering a lot, and open options you hadn’t considered.
Keep a part of your awareness on your own clarity, no matter what is happening:
BE CLEAR WITHIN THE UNCLEAR
