The pandemic has meant that we have lost a lot of what we were accustomed to. Can we still look for beauty or “see the moon” when our modern day structures fall?
The barn’s burnt down,
now I can see the moon.
Mizuta Masahide, 1657–1723, Japanese Zen poet
Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude
The future will never provide the reassurance you seek from it. As the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood, much of our suffering arises from attempting to control what is not in our control. And the main thing we try but fail to control – the seasoned worriers among us, anyway – is the future. We want to know, from our vantage point in the present, that things will be OK later on. But we never can. (This is why it’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it.)
It’s freeing to grasp that no amount of fretting will ever alter this truth. It’s still useful to make plans. But do that with the awareness that a plan is only ever a present-moment statement of intent, not a lasso thrown around the future to bring it under control. The spiritual teacher Jiddu Krisnamurti said his secret was simple: “I don’t mind what happens.” That needn’t mean not trying to make life better, for yourself or others. It just means not living each day anxiously braced to see if things work out as you hoped.
Oliver Burkeman, The eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life in The Guardian
Do not pursue the past.
Do not usher in the future.
Rest calmly within present awareness,
clear and non-conceptual
Karma Wangchûg Dorjé, 1556 – 1603, The Ocean of Definitive Meaning
If you surrender to the wind,
you can ride it
Toni Morison, American Novelist, 1931 – 2019
And without judging, condemning, forcing, blaming, just come back to this moment, this breath. Each breath, a new beginning. Each out breath, a complete letting go. And voila, here you are again, right here, and no agenda. Just this moment. Just this breath.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Mindfulbalance 