So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
Jane Hirshfield, The Weighing
Sunday Quote: Resilience
More conscious choices
As said before, the period of the pandemic can become a moment of reflection, where we come to know who we are and what we are our most important values. The challenge is, can we mindfully commit to living the rest of our lives from this place of truth?
Society … was regarded (by the Desert Fathers) as the shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life … These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.
Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart
Not a failure
The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world.
The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure, instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Marilynne Robinson
Whatever side of the balance
It’s human to have expectations, but clinging to them causes suffering.
If we can loosen our grip on expectations and settle down on whichever side of the balance we fall at this moment, we find unshakable peace of mind, and a truly stable life unfolds. [Meditation] is ceasing to be a person always gauging gain and loss and evaluating life according to such calculations.
Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Zen Teaching of homeless Kodo
Always moving
We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life….[but]..we’d rather not think of our lives in this way, however. We don’t want to see ourselves as simply a temporary formation, a whirlpool in the river of life. The fact is, we take form for a while, then when conditions are appropriate, we fade out.
However, we want to think that this little whirlpool that we are isn’t part of the stream. We want to see ourselves as permanent and stable. Our whole energy goes into trying to protect our supposed separateness. To protect the separateness, we set up artificial, fixed boundaries; as a consequence, we accumulate excess baggage, stuff that slips into our whirlpool and can’t flow out again. So this clogs up our whirlpool and the process gets messy. The stream needs to flow naturally and freely… We serve other whirlpools best if the water that enters ours is free to rush through and move on easily and quickly to whatever else needs to be stirred. The energy of life seeks rapid transformation. If we can see life this way and not cling to anything, life simply comes and goes.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special: Living Zen.
Individual Meaning
What makes people despair is that they try to find a universal meaning to the whole of life, and then end up by saying it is absurd, illogical, empty of meaning.
There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anais Nin
Mindfulbalance 