\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Agony of Paradise<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 God hides the fires of hell within Paradise.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 Paul Coelho\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Things rarely\u00a0play out the way we expect or want them to, or the way we imagine them. That became\u00a0painfully clear to me when I was offered a free ticket to Paradise. An Oscar\u00a0winning cinematographer I\u2019d been seeing for a short time (I\u2019ll call him Nick), invited\u00a0me to spend two months with him on his private island in Tahiti. I could hardly
believe it. I had moved into my own apartment, I was having a hard time living\u00a0alone, and I was more than ready to escape myself, to venture out and leave my\u00a0fears and my problems behind. I pictured romantic nights on the white sand\u00a0beach, making love under the stars and skinny-dipping beneath a full moon. I\u00a0envisioned balmy nights, swaying palm trees, warm ocean waters, perpetual
sunshine, and ripe fruit you could pluck right off the trees. An enchanted\u00a0garden.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m aware of\u00a0how many people would have traded places with me when Paradise opened its doors\u00a0and invited me in, but to my surprise and disappointment, the dream I\u2019d had\u00a0about where I was going and how I would feel were worlds apart from reality. We
had no running water. There were no toilets. We had to do our business standing\u00a0over a hole in the ground. The palm trees swayed gacefully, but the high winds\u00a0caused them to drop ominously heavy coconuts without warning. The wild chickens\u00a0never stopped squawking, the roosters crowed all night long, and the cuddly
looking kittens had fleas. The rain was fierce, the ocean floor was strewn with\u00a0thick black slugs that made swimming an exercise in icky-ness, the woven\u00a0thatched huts needed constant maintenance, the warm tropical sunshine caused\u00a0the fruit on the trees to heat up and rot and the ground was filled with tupa crabs scurrying underfoot to get to their holes. Worst of all, the balmy trade winds blew bloodthirsty mosquitoes into my face, day and night. They made it through the netting around our bed and while Nick was untouched, I had a swollen face after two days. I spent a great deal of the time scatching my insect bites and hovering over moquito repellent coils, feeling sad and ashamed. I had wanted to leave who I was behind, but I had brought myself with me and if I couldn\u2019t feel good in Paradise, there had to be something wrong with me.<\/p>\n
The point of the\u00a0story is that annoying clich\u00e9: wherever you go, there you are. Even if the island\u00a0had lived up to my dreams, I still had to find a way to stare my fear of being alone in the face and do the hard work to accept myself. Nick could not have been happier to be there, his own little Eden, but that was Nick. Not me. When I realized I was trying to live someone else\u2019s life (hardly for the first time), I cut the trip short by a month and flew back home. I lay in my bed, propped up on my down pillows, stroking my cat with the TV on, and I understood that Paradise is not a place. It\u2019s a state of mind. It\u2019s about developing the mindfullness to make peace with ourselves and accept who and what we are.<\/p>\n
But as hard as we try, acceptance doesn\u2019t happen in a\u00a0straight line. You get angry with yourself, you feel ashamed, you wallow in
your misery, and then, as if by magic, you forgive yourself. But there is\u00a0nothing magical about it when you wake up the next day to see that you\u2019re\u00a0riding the downward spiral of anger and self-blaming once again. The act of\u00a0rising above these emotions is a practice, not something you reach and it\u2019s fixed\u00a0forever.<\/p>\n
For some reason, we like to tell ourselves stories, more\u00a0often bad ones rather than good ones, all untrue, that catapult us into the punishing\u00a0spiral of fear and self-loathing. But if we can find endurance and have faith\u00a0in ourselves, we can save ourselves. We can create our own form of Paradise. Life\u00a0may play out in a way that feels unfair and punishing, and it will, but if we\u00a0can view those difficult experiences as teachings, we can ride that same spiral
back up again to a state of freedom as each stage\u00a0on the journey unfolds naturally upwards from the previous one.<\/p>\n
We may chide ourselves for staying in that\u00a0bad reltationship for too long, loath to stay and afraid to go, but what if we could\u00a0see that we had left the relationship in perfect timing when we had learned the
lessons? What if we could see that disappointment and compassion bring us closer\u00a0to ourselves, that Paradise is whatever makes us feel happy and fulfilled. I want\u00a0to be clear here that this is not my version of \u201ceverything happens for a\u00a0reason,\u201d or \u201cwe create our own reality.\u201d Contrary to popular opinion, I find\u00a0those ideas flawed and much too complicated to make any real sense. I believe\u00a0that if we do what it takes to face our fears and hone our ability to stay\u00a0present, to stop making up scary and false stories that we can\u2019t live up to and\u00a0never come true, we can make it through and find peace. In Buddhist practice,\u00a0they say that if we can stay aware and mindful enough to avoid taking the first\u00a0step into that negative abyss, we are on our way to freedom, wherever we are, as\u00a0each stage on the journey unfolds naturally from the one before.<\/p>\n
This is Paradise, a place where we know the\u00a0truth and accept ourselves anyway.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Agony of Paradise \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 God hides the fires of hell within Paradise. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 Paul Coelho\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Things rarely\u00a0play out the way we expect or want them to, or the way we imagine them. That became\u00a0painfully clear to me when I was offered a free ticket to Paradise. An Oscar\u00a0winning cinematographer I\u2019d been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2352,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351\/revisions\/2352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}