Runaway Train

“Every time that I have been here, you have instructed me to sit comfortably and then you have introduced your intended agenda …” I said to him, “Today, I would like for you to make yourself comfortable, and I am going to tell you what my agenda has been …” And I did. I told him about her. I told him about “us”, and how we had become “us.” And this remarkable man, who had guided, coaxed, instructed, advised, listened, exhorted, admonished, and cared about me, as my psychologist and friend, for years … was thunderstruck.

“For all of these years, I have learned all about the make-up, the elements, the structure of You. Over that time I have witnessed you trying to do all of the right and best things in life. But this is the first time that I have ever seen you ’alive.’ The lights are on and you are ’at home.’ You have been a human … doing all of your life’s required and expected things … and for the first time, I see you as a complete human being.” I listened to his summary statement … and responded, “So, I have evolved from a “Human Doing”, to a “Human Being.” And we shared a mutual smile of acknowledgement and agreement.

Since that day, I have been focused on my responsibilities to that Being that I now understand myself to have been wondrously created to be. And have assumed the posture that all of life’s required “doings”, the “stuff”, the details, will be well and rightly taken care as a natural out-flowing from my being my very best Me. As Ghandi so beautifully put it, I “must be the changes that I want to see in my world. Hence the license tag on my vehicle that reads “justbeingme.” Just as my Email address is “justbnmebrown@juno.com", and this blog is “Just-Being-John-Michael" as my testimony to whomever may be open and sensitive to the message suggested there. For, My Dear Reader, that is what I was best created to be … Me. No other person can be this individual that I alone am. And Life holds no one else responsible for being all that I am capable of being … other than Me.

I went, that day, long ago, from his office alive, aglow, and being those things from the inside, out. He said that She and I reminded him of a “runaway train”, and mailed me a tape of a song so-entitled (which I still have and smile every time that I see it.) That runaway train did as all runaway trains must do … it eventually surrendered to natural forces, circumstances, and elements … slowed … stopped … discharged its passengers, one at a time, at different stations, for them to pursue their own individual purposes. But I now write, and live, in the residual power of what I retain from that illumination, that life energy, and that sense of being that she and I discovered on our beautifully wild and wonderful train ride. And I will forever love and respect her, and all of my memories of that gift of our moments together.