On Alignment
It’s an incredible feeling, being aligned with Good, or God, or the Universe. For those of you just joining us, it is a recurring theme in this writing that I am not an “expert” in having faith and it seems important that building faith in the broadest sense of the word requires a bit of choose your own adventure sensibility. The nomenclature for how you define whatever it is you choose to believe in included. Call it Bill, for all I care, just so long as you’re willing to consider it at all.
Alignment is a funny thing. It’s a rather posh word these days as well, but it makes a lot of sense once we step into it. When we’re aligned, we get the YESes we are hoping for, rather than walking to a wall full of NOs (lawd, have I been there). We spend time around people who make us feel calm and safe, rather than on edge and slightly (or really) miserable. Plans just workout instead of falling apart. We get the support we need rather than encountering harshness or cruelty.
It just makes sense when it makes sense… but that’s also a totally foreign feeling to anyone lacking faith, particularly because we have lived in darkness for so long, we don’t even know what a campfire might look like or feel like, how to make one, or how to keep it going. We might even put out the first few, terrified by the promise of light and warmth after spending a lifetime in the dark.
Back in the day, I could sabotage the BLEEP out of pretty much anything. Hand me an opportunity in love, work, happiness, life, and I would doubt the ever loving BLEEP out of it until it was well beyond dead. More recently, I have watched other people do the same and lawd, it’s almost as painful to watch it from the sidelines. Almost.
I see now that such behavior is based on a complete lack of faith - in ourselves, in our support systems (sometimes for good reason), in life, in Good (or God). Everything is suspect, and therefore none of it can be real. I don’t really think that God (or Good) has one specific master plan for us, but I do believe we get many, many, many, many, many opportunities to develop faith along the way. Which belief system we opt for at any given crossroads either increases or decreases our likelihood of finding success, happiness, love, laughter, safety, security, fulfillment, purpose. We can choose the dark path or the light one, and it builds from there depending on what we are searching for, what we focus on, what we continue to believe in.
Faith, in my experience, has been the only way I have stayed on a path toward better, and a lack of faith has always made things worse. Now that I have faith, I experience a lot of pain watching others (many others) suffering, micromanaging, criticizing, and actively destroying opportunities due to a lack of it. It’s hard to watch, it’s hard to experience, it’s really hard, painful, heartbreaking to live through.
Many of us, maybe even most of us, lack faith and wouldn’t even know where to start to find it. The word has been co-opted by religion, but it belongs to all of us, and my point in all of this writing is that it can apply to just having faith in Good. And God, too, if you are interested.