KlausKommoss
Fixing things
At the warm shores of the Salton Sea in southern CA, we had car problems.
What a great place to break down – we were grateful that it happened there – but nonetheless, the problem still had to be solved. I lay under cars a lot in my life, with dirty hands and banged up knuckles, and although I managed to single-handedly get us out of so many serious car problems on all our crazy travels, I never enjoyed it. Any such skills I may have picked up over half a life time traveling with cars came uninvited and reluctantly. But now I have them, and that determines how I react when the motor home doesn’t start up anymore. I learned to fix things; I couldn’t do it any other way. Others have cultivated skills how to find help – hard to know what is ultimately better. Nowadays I’m much more interested in understanding things than in changing them (fixing them).
What we usually perceive as a problem is an event, a situation that is related to our self as an individual, as a person. A problem is an interpretation of a situation, the effect of a subjective “view”, a judgment referring to an expectation. One has to be conscious of one’s self to even be able to have a problem. A problem can exist for me but not as such. The universe doesn’t know problems. Problems don’t really exist, we invent them, we create them, and we have them. When you look closely, our mind is nothing but a problem factory. The mysterious and miraculous thing is that it is at the same time also an incredible problem-solving machine. So often this process of making and solving problems is our life. It consumes almost all our energy and blinds us to the underlying universal “ok-ness”, the most basic quality of everything before we have a thought about it, the marvelous wholeness that allows and contains our unique nature to process and manipulate everything, and yet offers freedom.
Fixing things
At the warm shores of the Salton Sea in southern CA, we had car problems.
What a great place to break down – we were grateful that it happened there – but nonetheless, the problem still had to be solved. I lay under cars a lot in my life, with dirty hands and banged up knuckles, and although I managed to single-handedly get us out of so many serious car problems on all our crazy travels, I never enjoyed it. Any such skills I may have picked up over half a life time traveling with cars came uninvited and reluctantly. But now I have them, and that determines how I react when the motor home doesn’t start up anymore. I learned to fix things; I couldn’t do it any other way. Others have cultivated skills how to find help – hard to know what is ultimately better. Nowadays I’m much more interested in understanding things than in changing them (fixing them).
What we usually perceive as a problem is an event, a situation that is related to our self as an individual, as a person. A problem is an interpretation of a situation, the effect of a subjective “view”, a judgment referring to an expectation. One has to be conscious of one’s self to even be able to have a problem. A problem can exist for me but not as such. The universe doesn’t know problems. Problems don’t really exist, we invent them, we create them, and we have them. When you look closely, our mind is nothing but a problem factory. The mysterious and miraculous thing is that it is at the same time also an incredible problem-solving machine. So often this process of making and solving problems is our life. It consumes almost all our energy and blinds us to the underlying universal “ok-ness”, the most basic quality of everything before we have a thought about it, the marvelous wholeness that allows and contains our unique nature to process and manipulate everything, and yet offers freedom.