Category: Make the most of life

Travelling lightly

Karl Duffy3 Comments

It’s like a dance. And we have to give each being space to dance their dance. Everything is dancing; even the molecules inside the cells are dancing. But we make our lives so heavy. We have these incredibly heavy burdens we carry with us like rocks in a big rucksack. We think that carrying this big heavy rucksack is our security; we think it grounds us. We don’t realize the freedom, the lightness of just dropping it off, letting it go. That doesn’t mean giving up relationships; it doesn’t mean giving up one’s profession, or one’s family,or one’s home. It has nothing to do with that; it’s not an external change. It’s an internal change. It’s a change from holding on tightly to holding very lightly.

Tenzin Palmo, Into the Heart of Life

Sunday quote: It is not always clear

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You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time

and build your wings on the way down

Anne Dilliard

The light of Summer

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File:Summer Solstice Sunrise over Stonehenge 2005.jpgWe can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato

Demystifying the relationship we have with our mind, our thoughts and emotions, is the essence of the mindfulness practice. It is like switching on the light in a dark room; no matter how long a room has remained in a state of darkness, once we turn on the light, everything is illuminated.

Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on Awakening to Our Natural Intelligence

Setting out on journeys and getting lost

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Today is Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce set for his novel Ulysses, a story of a journey across the city of Dublin, based on the wanderings of Ulysses sailing home after the Battle of Troy. It  reflects the ancient theme of life as a journey, of wisdom gained as we go along, of being blown off course and reaching a destination through paths not expected. It is the same for us: every day of our lives, winds blow and shift our direction. Some take us along with joy. Others throw us off-balance for a while, and there are winds that can blow hard and long, forcing us to keep our heads low under the gale. We all prefer to travel in sunny weather. However, what these ancient (and modern) stories tell us is that wisdom is an unexpected gift, and it frequently comes when we leave behind what we think we know or when we go through what  seems like detours or thorough getting lost. The realities of life challenge us with much that is not on our simplistic maps, and we have to let go and sometimes wander in the dark, trusting that the outcome will be revealed in time.

Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don’t be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding.

Krisnamurti

Lives as a to-do list

Karl Duffy2 Comments
Better is one handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and grasping after the wind. Ecclesiastes 4:6

Often our lives become so driven that we are moving through our moments to get to better ones at some later point. We live to check things off our to-do list, then fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, only to jump up the next morning to get on the treadmill once again. This way of living, if we can call it living, is compounded by all the ways in which our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them, generated in large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life. If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why. 

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

What defines us

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Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological, the spirit is eternal. The number of our years does not define us. There is in the human being a life force that never dies. It is the life force that proves to us that age does not fossilize us. Down deep, where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again. It is only the cold, clear light of dawn that damps it, the fear in ourselves that th years have taken us beyond the right to be active. It is our own fault is we refuse to think again all the great ideas of our life – and our own position on each of them.

Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years