Tag: impermanence

The myth of normality

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A quote from my favourite book of last year on a similar theme to Monday’s post on loneliness.Wisdom begins with clearly seeing the dynamics which operate in the ways that society portrays happiness.

The common myth that is perpetuated in society is that the normal person is happy, balanced and integrated – otherwise there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re mentally unstable. We’re even alarmed by unhappy people. Everyone in the media is smiling and cheerful. The politicians are all smiling, cheerful. confident; funeral homes even make the corpses up to look smiling, cheerful and confident.

Meanwhile however, perhaps you’re not smiling and you don’t feel cheerful and confident. You know you can’t live up to any of the images of the model person. You don’t have the right appearance or status symbols, your performance doesn’t cut it, you’re out of touch with the latest trends, or maybe you are just poor – someone whom society doesn’t want to acknowledge. Unhappiness in Western culture is often treated as a sign of failure. Others think, “They’re not happy, maybe they didn’t do enough. And maybe they’ll want something from me so I’d better steer away from them”

Ajahn Sucitto,  Turning the Wheel of Truth

Good days and bad days

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Níl aon suáilce gan a duáilce féin.  Irish Proverb

(lit. There is no virtue that does not have its own vice = There are no unmixed blessings in life)

Acceptance of life’s up and down’s may be a wiser way to start the New Year  and may  reflect the wisdom worked out over the centuries in some of the religious and wisdom traditions.  However, it does not mean that it is easy to do. The fact that we are continually surprised and upset by changes in our life is testimony to the resilience of our belief in – and wish for – something unchanging and permanent. We want things to last, to stay as they are, as indeed sometimes they should. Therefore, every time we have an experience that brings us face to face with the reality of impermanence, such as when someone moves away, a friendship ends or we lose something we care about, we suffer, sometimes deeply. It  is a reminder that it is in the nature of the human heart to form attachments, and of the flip side of being fully involved in life. However, when we come to really understand that things are not guaranteed to remain the same, or that people are not always consistent , it frees us from always reading what happened as a story about us. It also saves us from defaulting to the usual pattern of interpretation that we use, such as that we are to blame or that we did not try hard enough.

It would seem that some awareness of the impossibility of holding onto things exactly as we would like to has been around since time began.  Different cultures have tried to understand it in different ways. We can see this in the Irish proverb quoted at the start of the post. The Ancient Greeks tried to understand it by blaming the gods. As we can see in this extract from the Iliad, they believed that humans received either a mixture of up’s and down’s, good and evil, or received suffering, but never received pure good times that lasted forever: On the floor of Jove’s palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones.  He for whom Jove the lord of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil fortune; but he to whom Jove sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by gods nor men.

Fog and living moment to moment

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Dark and foggy. The mountains hidden. All we can be sure of is this moment. We do not really know what the future holds. We construct the future not by dreaming how we would like it to be,  but by living the reality of what is in our life at this moment.

The future is completely open,

and we are writing it moment to moment.

Pema Chodron

Restlessness

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I have been reflecting these days on how our sense of self is related to finding a space where we can feel safe, which we can be “at home”. It may be a place, but it is more likely found in the acceptance and love of others. We search for this all our lives. Without it we are restless, even lost.

 

One way to express the crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.

Henri Nouwen

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

Maya Angelou

Sunday Quote: Looking inward

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When we are no longer able to change a situation,

we are challenged to change ourselves.

Victor Frankl

Hope

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Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well,

but the certainty that something makes sense,

regardless of how it turns out

Vaclav Havel