stone in the shoe

How long would you put up with

A stone in your shoe?

Imagine you're out walking and a very small stone, a piece of gravel, gets in your shoe. It's a little bit uncomfortable. You notice it with every step, and yet it is not so painful that you stop straightway to shake it out. It's right at that boundary of bearability. But sooner or later you probably do stop and take that stone out of your shoe. And in a way, the sooner you do that the better. It's just causing you a little bit of misery otherwise. And the longer you procrastinate, the longer you have to put up with that little misery. So best, as soon as you notice that stone, to take your shoe off and shake it out. 

Now I say all this because a stone in the shoe has just popped into my mind as an analogy, like a little parable. Most of us have, deep down somewhere inside us, a feeling that something's not quite right. We may not even be conscious of it. It might be buried so deep in our psyche, that there's something wrong. And this is a bit like having a stone in the shoe. It's there inside us, this feeling, something's not quite right, and it's causing us misery. But the misery isn't particularly acute. It's just about bearable. So many people don't really look into it, perhaps never in their whole life, or they postpone that inquiry.

It takes time and effort to look into oneself, to find the source of that feeling of unease. And typically to get to it, we have to unearth the whole shadow side of our psychology: things we don't want to admit about ourselves, things we would rather were not in us, and yet they are. So that work is rather arduous, which is another reason why people put up with the misery. But if you do try and take this stone out of your shoe, if you do try and get to the bottom of the feeling that there's something wrong, then eventually you will reach the point where you see that the reason something is feeling off, in life, is that you have, somewhere along the way, separated yourself from the rest of existence. And that feeling of separation leaves one feeling incomplete, something is missing, something is wrong. And it's only when we allow ourself to be reunited with existence, that that feeling that something is wrong can go away.

This is why, for millennia, religious people have been trying to unite with god, to become one with all that is. And the irony is we are one with existence. It is only our psychological world that has created a separation, and with it that chronic misery. So let's do this work. Let's get to the bottom of it all, and let's take that stone out of our shoe as soon as possible.