The way of wisdom is not the way of “why”, but the way of “what”. The Hebrew word [for wisdom] – chochma – can be read as choch ma – “what is”. Wisdom will not tell you why things are the way they are, but will show you what they are and how you can live in harmony with them.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom
Sooner or later, everyone will face not getting what they want. How we respond to this unavoidable moment determines how much peace or agitation we will have in our life. In truth, this is the moment that opens all others. For it is our acceptance of things as they are and not as we would have them that allows us to find our place in the stream of life. Free of our entitlements, we can discover that we are small fish in the stream and go about our business of finding the current.
This deeper chance to shed our willfulness doesn’t preclude our sadness and disappointment that things aren’t going the way we had imagined. But when we stay angry and resentful at how life unfolds beyond our will, we refuse the gifts of being a humble part in the inscrutable whole. When we stay angry and resentful that —and you can fill in the blank— the stock market didn’t reward our conscientious investing or the hurricane destroyed the truck we were going to inherit or the promotion we earned was given to someone else or the person we love so deeply doesn’t care in the same way, we risk getting stuck.
Eventually, we are asked to undo the story we’ve been told about life — or the story we have told ourselves — so we might drop freshly into life. For under all our attempts to script our lives, life itself cannot be scripted. It’s like trying to net the sea. Life will only use our nets up: tangle them, sink them, unravel them, wear them down, embed them in its bottom. Like the sea, the only way to know life is to enter it. How then do we listen below our willfulness?
Mark Nepo, Not Getting what We Want
Whenever the disempowering lens of history falls over our eyes, the present reality is subverted to the dynamics of the past, and one remains a prisoner….once again. Learning to find ones own truth, hold to it, and negotiate with others seems easy enough on paper. In practice, it means catching reflexive patterns while they occur, suffering the anxiety caused by living more consciously, and tolerating the assault of anxiety-driven “guilt” afterwards. (This guilt is not genuine; it is a form of anxiety aroused by the anticipated negative reaction of the other person). Such reactions for the child were enormously distressing and are still debilitating for the adult. Over the years we tend to believe that this old familiar system is who we really are, and, by and large, such a system so frequently presented to the world becomes how the world sees us, Being nice has, however, ceased being nice.
James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
You must remain open to the possibilities and resist the temptation to make a closure before your life has run out. This means always keeping your very identity open-ended, because a life work defines you. Spiritual writers sometimes say that all finite loves point to an infinite love, and so there is always a yearning for more. The same could be true of a life work. Any finite task or career points to another beyond it. Your sense of what you are meant to do with your life has to remain open-ended, no matter how much or how little you feel you have accomplished. You never know fully what you are called to do.
Thomas Moore, A Life at Work
My favorite picture is earthrise as seen from the moon. It’s perfect. A great blue and green ball floating in vast black space, hanging right there in its orbit. From that vantage point, the scene on earth is awesome. creatures being born, other ones dying; plants blooming on one side, plants withering on the other; snow snowing, winds blowing, volcanoes erupting, earthquakes shivering, people talking, music playing. From the moonview, its incredible cosmic drama. From our usual view, inside the drama, looking up at the moon, it’s a different story. It changes from the drama to my drama and gets to be a problem. If you’re far enough away, it’s not your story – its one of the six and a half billion stories.
Sylvia Boorstein: It’s Easier than you Think
To have loved is everything,
I loved, once, a hummingbird who came every afternoon– the freedom-loving male–
who flew by himself to sample the sweets of the garden, to sit on a high, leafless branch with his red throat gleaming.
And then, he came no more.
And I’m still waiting for him, ten years later,
to come back, and he will, or he will not.
There is a certain commitment that each of us is given,
that has to do with another world,
if there is one.
I remember you, hummingbird.
I think of you every day even as I am still here,
soaked in color, waiting year after honey-rich year.
Mary Oliver, An Empty Branch in the Orchard
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