Gazing in the Mirror

March 27 - Living at the Speed of Light

The really important kind of freedom
involves attention, and awareness, and
discipline, and effort, and being able
truly to care about other people and
to sacrifice for them, over and over,
in myriad petty little unsexy ways,
every day.
~ David Foster Wallace

Spirituality is natural goodness. God
is not a person; God is a presence
personified in us. Spirituality is not
a thing; it is the atmosphere of God's
Presence, goodness, truth, and beauty.
~ Ernest Holmes

One year, as I was working through the boredom of posting items into our financial records in order to prepare for the filing our annual tax returns, a little display of incoming emails that pops up in the lower right-hand side of my computer's display screen caught my eye – "Thanks for your Walmart.com order". What ?!? I thought. I spoke to my husband who sits back to back with me in our office space – "Honey, did you order something from Walmart ?" "No", he replied. Hmmm I don't remember ordering anything either, I best take a look at it.

What I saw shocked me. It was an order totaling $298.69 and included a Motorola Wireless Gateway Modem and a 2-year extended warranty on that. There was a second transaction for a $200 gift card. Whoa .... I couldn't find a telephone number anywhere to contact them though I saw information about how to cancel an order on their website. I called the local WalMart store for help but they weren't very "helpful". I answered my own question – best to cancel this immediately and call my bank regarding my debit card immediately as well. If I could have talked to a live person and if it had been just some sort of software "mistake", then I could have saved myself the trouble of cancelling the debit card and going immediately to the bank to relinquish it and get another. But there was no person to talk to about it.

Perhaps it was just as well, everything was perfect just as it was. I was talking to the bank employee who immediately "hot carded" my debit card and who was confirming to me that she did see this charge on my account. And even as the bank representative and I were speaking, I was cancelling the items one by one on the Walmart.com website. And the bank rep is saying to me, now this is an interesting part of my story, for in real time she was actually seeing the credit from the cancellation of the transaction hitting my bank account online. There is nothing that I dislike more than someone who is stealing from other people to support themselves even as I do have a very real compassion for whatever desperation drives a person to such behaviors.

Once again I was grateful for the speed that is our modern "connected" lives. Here were 3 entities – my self, the bank rep and the Walmart website all interconnected and experiencing each other simultaneously. Then I changed my password at Walmart.com and also sent an email to them to alert them that they might have a security breach. I searched my mind for possible sources of intrusion and came up with 2 or 3 but no way to know for certain how or through what I had been compromised. I expressed gratitude in my message to Walmart. Gratitude seems ever present in my life regardless of the disagreeable nature or inconvenience of specific circumstances.

Life does move at the speed of Light now. I can chat online with a friend on the other side of the globe in The Netherlands, Australia/New Zealand or in India and it is in "real" time even though day and night or even the season of the year is actually a different expression for each of us. This effect has totally changed my perception of Life. Not only does it undo exactness as being some kind of universal experience but this also creates an uncertainty as to what is actually "true" in a physical sense. These understandings add a degree of wholeness and contribute to me having a bigger picture of reality which yields a broader perspective in mind.

Because life moves so quickly now we can also find ourselves in "trouble" with someone we genuinely care about because we dash off something in writing and in seconds it has become viewable by the other person. We may not have had enough time to process the emotion to something less intense as our response. Perhaps we have not given our self enough time to fully contemplate what our response should be as we might have done before the Internet and Email were part of our natural daily lives. The speed at which Life unfolds Itself now makes finding our genuine center, our primary source of being, and living from a heartfelt, authentic compassionate nature all the more important. Even if we appear to make a mistake, even if we are not mindful and someone takes advantage of our lack of attention – the outcome can always be "good" – if we can only perceive it as that always being exactly what IS. That is living in acceptance of reality.

~ perspective

I am grateful to be globally
connected by modern technology.
I am grateful to find real people
in the midst of all that machinery.
I remain present in all things that
happen and remain grateful always.
The Truth is always present and
waiting for me to realize it within
and by an alert awareness – respond.
I find magic in my world, in kindness
and whispers, and I pay attention
without an expectation of reward
and yet find there are advantages.

#cancellations #compassion #contemplation #desperation #emotion #gratitude #perspective #reality #security #understanding