That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning:
‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’
Mary Oliver, Foreword, Long Life: Essays and other Writing
Category: Make the most of life
Fitting in
A new home decoration show starts on the Irish television channel this evening. The popularity of shows like this at the moment – or ones which look at houses abroad or down the country – and which start when people are a bit down after the Summer holidays, can fuel the anxious, comparing mind. Even how you decorate your home becomes a sign of how well you are doing, or another way to feel that you do not match up:
The need to be normal is the predominant anxiety disorder
in modern life.
Thomas Moore, Original Self
The myth of lives without challenges
Pain is inevitable; lives come with pain. Suffering is not inevitable. If suffering is what happens when we struggle with our experience because of our inability to accept it, then suffering is an optional extra.
Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier than you Think
The common myth that is perpetuated in society is that the normal person is happy, balanced and integrated – otherwise there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re mentally unstable. We’re even alarmed by unhappy people. Everyone in the media is smiling and cheerful. The politicians are all smiling, cheerful. confident; funeral homes even make the corpses up to look smiling, cheerful and confident…… Unhappiness in Western culture is often treated as a sign of failure.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
photo Stephen Sweeeney
Intimate Kindness
Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; rather, it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy. Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference. Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Hier zu sein ist so viel — to be here is immense. To be created and come to birth is to be blessed. Some primal kindness chose us and brought us through the forest of dreaming until we could emerge into the clearance of individuality, with a path of life opening before us through the world.
John O Donohue
The essential rhythm
Another short piece from poet Seamus Heaney, whose funeral is taking place around this time in Dublin.
Getting started, keeping going, getting started again –
in art and in life,
it seems to me this is the essential rhythm .
Seamus Heaney
….whatever you do
Big sporting day in Dublin for the local team….
Leisure and sleep, moments of inactivity and relaxation, can all restore balance within ourselves and allow us touch into our deeper nature. Even a few moments of conscious slowing down, finding some space from our tendency to rush, has a beneficial effect on our overall system. Taking time each day to develop an ongoing practice of mindfulness soothes the nervous system and encourages calm:
Mindfulbalance 