"Play dead, Sherbert! Good boy."Sherbert is an adopted fish. He spent too long in a small bowl, and he's a little warped. His tail is permanently crooked. When we got him, his mouth didn't open much. Our other fish allow me to do energy work with them, which really helped when the water got ammoniated. He ignored the energy work; until he got really sick, and THEN he consented and together we managed to get his mouth to open enough so he could eat.
He's a pretty stubborn fish. He's at least 3 years old.
His new trick is to swallow more air than food. It looks pretty uncomfortable. For maybe a month, he was able to keep his balance, and he'd float partway out of the water. Either he is swallowing more air, or he's acclimated because now he floats upside down until he farts. Yes, he farts; I've seen it.
He still refuses to do the energy work.
Why does he cling so, to his discomfort? Does he say to himself: "This is how I am. I hurt, I can't compete well with the other fish, and my life is hard." Why he refuses my help is beyond me, but I accept it. Why he continues to abide in discomfort is a mystery, but I can't change him. Why he continues to define his life as being hard when in fact there are the same opportunities offered him as all the other fish is painful for me to watch.
Life isn't hard. Life simply is. Are you going to continue to reject the possibility that it's your unwillingness to embrace a new way that makes your world a small knot of pain? Will you forever be 100% committed to living as though your world would end if things suddenly got easy?
I'm 100% committed to letting you have your experience, and I'm also 100% committed to being part of that experience. I open myself to your pain. I see very clearly that all you have to do is to choose ease, and it would be easy. I am at choice about abiding with you in your discomfort. Therfore I have great strength about it, and will be here in this relationship for as long as you are.
If you were a person, my actions would probably drive you crazy. You'd wonder why the difficulties of life don't get me down. I could explain that they do, but they don't change who I am. My apparent rock-steadiness and perpetual positive perkiness might lead you to believe that I'm uncaring that your life is hard, or perhaps that I have my head in the sand.
Here's the thing: I've been to the place where Life Is Hard. It sucks there. It saps all my strength. I finally realized that what was going on around me had nothing to do with how I respond to it. What goes on around me does not change who I am. I get to choose whether my adrenaline glands are constantly worked, or not. I'm not an adrenaline junkie, I'm a peace junkie.
If you were a person, I could say all this. But you might not comprehend it still. In which case, I'd just go back to being 100% committed to walking alongside you on your own path of discovery.
Fish experiment
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