Yesterday was Ash Wednesday... :)
This day marks the starting day of the first time I'll ever have given something up for Lent. I had heard of doing this before, and remember pitying those friends of mine who were busy turning down things like chocolate and sweets, or giving up TV, for forty days. However, I now realize just how refreshing and enlightening it might be to really challenge myself... I was reading on Lynn Jericho's blog (a beautiful blog - if you ever want to indulge in some thought-provoking spiritual discussions, without the whole fire and brimstone aspect, check it out)...

Anyway, she was explaining her view of Lent. During the 40 days, from Feb 6 to March 22, the point is to try to discover and then weed out the "three temptations" in your life. By doing this, it can serve to show you who YOU truly are, or at least allow a glimpse of yourself that may normally become buried or distorted when bombarded with outside influences. These influences often take the form of one or more of the three temptations:

Prejudice: not necessarily prejudice against others, it could be anywhere in your life where you allow dead thoughts (as she calls them), that come wafting up from the past, to colour your thoughts and responses to things around you NOW. This includes prejudice against yourself, against situations you find yourself in, and/or against others. I know for me, I often find situations where I think 'gee, that would be so much fun if I could do... (insert activity)' but then quickly dismiss the thought as those old ghosts come back to haunt me 'ya, but remember that time when you did something similar, and you were horrible at it'... Or in other cases where I find myself presented with something that, if I were open about it, might be truly surprising and wonderful in life, but I write it off as 'been there, done that', painting over it with my thoughts of another similar time and place, and allowing my original thoughts and emotions to cloud any new ones I might feel. In this way, I miss out. It's about allowing your thoughts to live in the present, to discover something in your day and embrace it with a sense of 'newness', ignoring all past experiences that might ruin your perception of the moment.

Addiction: of course, there are the standard addictions that we all hear about - drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, etc. But you'd be surprised how other behaviors can become addictive too, often because we are doing them in order to hide from something that scares us or makes us uncomfortable. For myself, one big addiction I have is the internet. Some people might think that's a ridiculous statement, because the internet is not a 'bad' thing, I'm learning all the time, I have the world at my fingertips and I can always turn off the machine and walk away... But that's just it, I can't. If I do turn it off, I'm left with a void, a feeling of 'now what?' - and this even happens when I'm at WORK. I am bored, unstimulated, unhappy, and unfulfilled, unless I'm wasting my hours and minutes surfing endless websites about what buffalo eat in June, or where the word 'mango' comes from, etc. What's the real reason I'm surfing? Because I'm bored at work, because I like to know the answer to every question that pops into my head, because I'm afraid to live in the outside world where I might be rejected or disappointed. It's like I'm on an endless quest to be 'filled up' by false, flashy, entertaining websites, instead of taking satisfaction from getting my work done and maybe then enjoying a moment of real, not stolen, 'free time' to myself. Anyway, so addictions can be to anything, often once you remove the addiction, you'll find the thing underneath that you were hiding from, and maybe by facing it, you will find you're finally able to feel peace.

Fantasy: another one of my terrible afflictions... Not 'that' kind of fantasy. I'm talking about daydreaming your life away. Again, this is done, for me, with the Internet. Any minute of the day I can be instantly transported to a small villa in France, browsing pictures of quaint country cottages surrounded by swaying lavendar fields, and in the next moment, I'm checking out aerial views of the Great Pyramids, before studying a site about being a stay at home Mom or volunteering to help animals. The sky is the limit. But in the end, am I travelling anywhere? Am I meeting people? Am I enriching the lives of children or animals around me? Nope. I'm staring, glassy-eyed at a wide LCD screen two feet from my face in my sterile cubicle environment, surrounded by endless stacks of paper waiting to be pushed around. And at the end of the day, when I COULD be doing something exciting, I'm mentally worn out from all my 'exploits' and just want to trudge home to make dinner and mope around the house. For me, by removing the Internet, I would hopefully at first find a void, a void that is waiting to be filled with REAL life. Then bit by bit, perhaps 'real life' will begin to seep in around the edges, and suddenly I might find I'm too busy to bother with the computer. :) Of course, it doesn't have to be the internet either. It can just be thinking too much. Put me on a 40 minute bus-ride home with nothing to read or listen to and I'm suddenly off in a world all my own, sometimes so deeply immersed in it that even when neighbours smile at me, I don't see them (I had one actually clap at me to make sure I was okay, lol). Yet another avoidance technique - our world is full of them, MP3 players, books, computers, blackberries, or just plain old staring into space can fill an otherwise 'boring' space of time. But what if you realized where you were, took a look at the others around you, offered a smile, or your seat to someone who needed it, would you feel better? Probably! I can tell you, letting your imagination run wild is a totally unfulfilling experience because sooner or later the bus stops, you get out, and you're back to reality. A reality that can be rather bleak if you're busy thinking your life away, instead of taking action and doing something.

So, then, to augment all this 'withholding' of *fun* things, I also want to ADD something over Lent. I have made a list of 10 things I would do, if I had all the time in the world, and nothing to stop me (including my own fears). I'm of course not going to do half of them, but I made them small, baby-step sorts of things, and I'm hoping to maybe accomplish one or two of them over the next forty days. We'll see. Once I start to go stir-crazy because I can't touch the keyboard, I might just actually finish something. :)

Anyway, for those of you challenging yourselves, I wish you all the best of luck. :) It might not be easy or fun, or even possible, but hey, it'd be nice to remind ourselves who is boss in this lifetime, and believe me, it's not supposed to be Dell Computers... ;)
xo