The rush of holidays and year end can be powerful. So much to do. We can’t stop bustling. Something might get dropped.
We don’t have time to see the look of wonder on a child’s face, or hear the kitten-soft whisper of snow beginning to fall, or breathe in the musky scent from a neighbor’s chimney. We don’t have time to drop to our knees with gratitude for being in this place and time, with these people to love, and these hands to serve, and these eyes to soak in the beauty around us. There is so much to do we simply don’t have time to pause and pay attention to the blessing of it all.
We wear many masks and fluff ourselves up with many props, but how’s that working for us? Nikki Giovanni notices:
A lot of people refuse to do things because they don’t want to go naked, don’t want to go without a guarantee. But that’s what’s got to happen. You go naked until you die.
What guarantees do we have in this life anyway? To health, to wealth, to job security, to happiness? Not so much. There really aren’t any guarantees to anything we do, and we delude ourselves to think otherwise. When we ‘go naked’ we engage from a place of authenticity, without the masks and props. We, our actual selves, enter into this thing called life.
J.K. Rowling notes:
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all– in which case, you fail by default.
This is it, our one shot, our one life, and we owe it to ourselves to go into it as ourselves and with gusto.
Dick Van Dyke is a national treasure, still singing and dancing his way through life at nearly 100. He reminds us that there are dark times, but behind the clouds the sun still shines. We show up. We do our best. And we realize that not everything is within our control.
He says,
We should never judge a day by its weather. It means you never know what’s going to happen,’ I said. ‘You do your best, then take your chances. Everything else is beyond our control.
Enjoy this lovely interaction between Van Dyke and Chris Martin, a balm for any troubled soul.
‘If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden,’ muse the characters in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. And, perhaps, on a more intimate level, so our mind is too a garden.
We cultivate our thoughts, enrich them with information, learn, grow, stretch. But weeds can overrun any garden, and we can find our minds overcome with anxiety, negative thinking, and endless catastrophic thinking.
But Burnett notes:
Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.
When we find ourselves overcome with negative thoughts, we can imagine our mind a garden. Something we can lovingly tend, plucking weeds, nourishing blooms, replacing gloom with gratitude, planting seeds of possibility and promise.
While there are many things in this world we cannot control, we still can control our thoughts and find a way to focus on ones that keep our mental garden thriving.
Just when we think we get what life is all about, something comes along to knock us upside the head and show us we have it wrong. It forces us to reevaluate our foundational assumptions about the purpose of life and look at things in a whole new way. It’s a paradigm shift.
Stephen Covey tells of a paradigm shift he experienced:
“I remember a mini-Paradigm Shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly — some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene. Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.
“The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
“It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”
“The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, ‘Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.’
“Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry. Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.
“Many people experience a similar fundamental shift in thinking when they face a life-threatening crisis and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role, such as that of husband or wife, parent or grandparent, manager or leader.
“It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.
“In the words of Thoreau, ‘For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.’ We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.”
(from Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)
Or consider the paradigm shift that Ebenezer Scrooge’s partner, now a ghost, Jacob Marley, recounts to him before the visit of the three Christmas ghosts in Christmas Carol. Both Scrooge and Marley thought they had life figured out–it was all about business and making money, the more the better. But Marley has had a paradigm shift since dying:
“‘But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,’ faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
“‘Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.’ “
Get ready to get hit upside the head, metaphorically speaking. It may be time for a paradigm shift.
How do we read the news and not get overwhelmed or angry, disconnected or depressed? How do we keep showing up with compassion and grace in a world where there is so much hate? How do we keep ourselves on the right path through the midst of it all? How do we continue to show up from a place of compassion, forgiveness, and grace? how do we keep our hearts from growing hard?
In this thoughtful letter, Rabbi Yael Levy shares his insights on how to pray with the news:
The 17th of the Hebrew month Tammuz initiates a three-week period of mourning that leads to Tisha b’Av, which is the day that marks the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem in 586 BCE and 70 CE.
Tradition teaches that the Temple was destroyed because hatred became the operating principle in the community. The scorn, contempt and disdain that characterized daily interactions caused the Divine Presence to flee and leave the Temple vulnerable to attack.
These next three weeks ask us to reflect on the hatred that we allow to take root in our hearts. The wisdom of the tradition acknowledges that hatred can sometimes feel energizing and “so right,” but allowing it to fill our bodies and guide our actions leads to destruction.
Many years ago I was taught the practice of praying with the news. I have shared it over the years and always find myself returning to it during this season.
In this practice, each time we read or listen to a news report that enrages us, we turn our attention to those harmed by what is happening and pray for their healing and well-being. Doing so encourages us to acknowledge feelings of anger, grief and despair, and at the same time it turns our attention toward connection and compassion. Praying with the news can help us learn to bear witness to devastation and mayhem, while keeping our hearts soft, our minds calm, and our actions clear.
I am struggling mightily with this practice these days in the wake of continued violence and oppression in this country and throughout the world. Hatred can sometimes feel like such a welcome harbor. Not only does it feel so right, it can also act as a shield, creating the illusion that I don’t have to acknowledge the grief and heartbreak I am experiencing.
I need practices to help quiet the rage and fear, to loosen the constriction of hatred and to help me be with overwhelming grief. I need practices to help me return to compassion, love, joy and possibility. I find praying with the news both painful and helpful. It keeps me connected, allows sorrow, and grounds me in care and love.Weekly reading from the Awakin.org newsletter.
Do you have any disagreeable people in your life? People you avoid, maybe?
What if they are the ones who need love the most?
Most teachers will tell you that the child who acts out is the one most in need of love and attention. but those kids have learned to ask for it in all the wrong ways. And those children grow up, sometimes into disagreeable adults who still ask for love and attention in all the wrong ways. Maybe they have been disappointed so many times, they’ve learned to strike first, to reject you before you reject them.
Do you know anyone like that?
It’s no particular challenge to love the people who love us. But the ones who rile us, who ruffle our feathers, who are caustic and rude? That takes some serious patience and humility. But, perhaps, that is a place you are desperately needed.
The might have beens are a killer. We each take so many forks in the road, it’s easy to wonder how our lives might be if we had taken a different turn—gone to a different school, chosen a different career, picked a different partner. Those might have beens can keep us up late with longing and despair about the life we currently have. And, more importantly, they can strip those lives, the actual lives we are living, of joy.
Consider this poem by Carl Dennis:
The God Who Loves You
BY CARL DENNIS
It must be troubling for the god who loves you To ponder how much happier you’d be today Had you been able to glimpse your many futures. It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings Driving home from the office, content with your week— Three fine houses sold to deserving families— Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened Had you gone to your second choice for college, Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted Whose ardent opinions on painting and music Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion. A life thirty points above the life you’re living On any scale of satisfaction. And every point A thorn in the side of the god who loves you. You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments So she can save her empathy for the children. And would you want this god to compare your wife With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus? It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight Than the conversation you’re used to. And think how this loving god would feel Knowing that the man next in line for your wife Would have pleased her more than you ever will Even on your best days, when you really try. Can you sleep at night believing a god like that Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is And what could have been will remain alive for him Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill Running out in the snow for the morning paper, Losing eleven years that the god who loves you Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend No closer than the actual friend you made at college, The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight And write him about the life you can talk about With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed, Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.
We have choice and agency in the life we have. It is there we find meaning and purpose. It is there, in the now, that we can find joy. Embrace that life.
And yet most of us internalize myths that we are meant to live pain-free lives and that there is always more time. How much more could we accomplish if we embrace the reality instead?
We’re breakable. But our vulnerability is our strength. And when we mend from something painful, we are likely to have tools and skills and sensitivities that may help us and make us more empathic going forward. Breaking and mending is part of growth. Part of change. Part of evolving. To be scared of breaking is to be scared of living.
Time’s short. Now is the time to reach out, apologize, help…whatever it is you’re waiting for a different day to do. There is no promised day. Things don’t just happen. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. We help heal the broken world, and our own broken selves, by continuing to love even in the darkness.
In this age of technology and instant gratification, sometimes we forget the simple pleasures. Like meandering, and chatting people up, and pausing to soak it all in. Kurt Vonnegut used to like to walk into town for a single envelope when he had something to mail, ignoring his wife’s argument that he could buy more than one envelope at a time.
Vonnegut responds, “…And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is – we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
Of course, an author depends on immersing themself in the midst of living, noticing details, trying to hold on to it all long enough to capture it in words. But don’t we all benefit from farting around and noticing the little things? Kind of like writing ‘I was here’ in graffiti. We’re here. This is our now.
QuotableCreek.com 