Tag: impermanence

For everything there is a season

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The Autumn Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere.

If you feel like you’re running out of time, read this: You’re not. …there isn’t a designated time in life for anything, and although it’s hard not to, your timeline shouldn’t be compared to the person standing next to you. Just because the timing was right for them, doesn’t mean it would be right for you. There is enough happiness, love, and opportunity to go round, no matter when it happens. Your life shouldn’t feel like a race, because it isn’t one. Where there are fast days, there should be slow days that follow, days where you can reflect and recalibrate because everything you are going through right now is preparing you for the next chapter, every challenge directly informing the decisions that you’re about to make for yourself.

Being present will show you what is worth taking with you along the way as you navigate life because the destination won’t bring you peace unless you let the journey teach you who you are, and just how much capacity you have to experience change, both within yourself and in the world. You aren’t running out of time, so don’t be afraid to slow down. Things fall into place when we create space for them to.

Seyda Noir

how little

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After Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic , in temperatures that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.”

Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness

Falling apart and renewal

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Written during the COVID pandemic but can apply to all setbacks and seasons in our lives.

There is a giveaway in all of the apocalyptic sections of the three Synoptic Gospels. In Matthew 24:8, hidden there in the middle of the wars and earthquakes it says, “All this is only the beginning of the birth pangs.” Apocalypse is for the sake of birth not death. Yet most of us have heard this reading as a threat. Apparently, it’s not. Anything that upsets our normalcy is a threat to the ego but in the Big Picture, it really isn’t.

In Luke 21, Jesus says right in the middle of the catastrophic description: “Your endurance will win you your souls.” Falling apart is for the sake of renewal, not punishment. Again, such a telling line. In Mark 13, Jesus says “Stay awake” four times in the last paragraph (Mark 13:32–37). In other words, “Learn the lesson that this has to teach you.” It points to everything that we take for granted and says, “Don’t take anything for granted.”

We would have done history a great favor if we would have understood apocalyptic literature. It’s not meant to strike fear in us as much as a radical rearrangement.

It’s not the end of the world. It’s the end of worlds – our worlds that we have created.

Richard Rohr, This is an Apocalypse

There is a time for all things

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There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, ‘tis not to come;

if it be not to come, it will be now;

if it be not now, yet it will come.

The readiness is all.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, ii

Monday morning, start again

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One part of meditation practice is not holding on too strongly to the past or leaning too far into the future. This allows us to savour the present fully.

And if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal.

Enter into the happiness, and burst.

Mahmoud Darwish, 1941 – 2008, Palestinian poet and author, Journal of an Ordinary Grief

Round and round

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There is a whole drama department in our head, and the casting director indiscriminately handing out the roles of inner dictators and judges, adventurers and prodigal sons, inner entitlement and inner impoverishment. ….When we see how compulsively these thoughts repeat themselves, we being to understand the psychological truth of samsara, the Sanskrit word for circular, repetitive existence…..Samsara also describes the unhealthy repetitions in our daily life. On a moment-to-moment level, we can see our samsaric thought patters re-arise, in unconscious and limited ways. For example, we see how frequently our thoughts include fear, judgment, or grasping. Our thoughts try to justify our point of view. As an Indian saying points out: “He who cannot dance claims the floor is uneven.”

Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology