Tag: Look for Happiness

Speed

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There is more to life than increasing its speed

Mahatma Ghandi

Sunshine

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Sometimes one is struck by the goodness and care of people and how they bring kindness into the world. Sometimes one can only be grateful for this care. They remind us that the true purpose of life is best understood in terms of our capacity to receive and give love. The human heart is at its deepest and the mind most spacious when we act in accord with this capacity.

In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.

St John of the Cross

What we can see in difficult moments

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I bought a lovely book of poetry last week, called Mala of the Heart: 108 Sacred Poems. I find that they express a profound sensitivity to the deeper aspects of life. I will post some of them from time to time over the next while. This one speaks to me at this moment. Sometimes difficult experiences put us in touch with what lies beneath the surface, namely, the soul, or our deepest self, and help us in our search for identity or meaning.

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

Hafiz (1320-1390 A.D)

Not always seeking something new

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And, again, a similar theme to those over the last two days, this time in the beautiful book by John Tarrant, The Light Inside the Dark:

Repetition is narrow, and, if undertaken mechanically, stifles us, but it can also allow us to go deep. In meditation we repeat ourselves day after day, coming back to the stillness and the breath, and again and again realize that we haven’t yet experienced it completely, that it is ever more subtle. Repetition, when done right, drifts almost imperceptibly into vast, new realms, but with a slowness that allows for deepening, beauty, the appreciation of the neglected moment. It stabilizes our relation to eternity.

A long conversation

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We sometimes mistakingly think that life will unfold magically in a flash, or that we will be born mature and fully developed, just as Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. It would be nice if we saw clearly, immediately, our path and role, but that would take away a lot of the lessons we gain from slowly finding out or from taking wrong turns. Life is, rather, a slow process, a long conversation and dialogue, where we do not often see clearly and are always searching,  as this beautiful Mary Oliver poem reminds us:

Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the hour
and the bell; grant me, in your mercy,
a little more time. Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart. Who knows what
will finally happen or where I will be sent,
yet already I have given a great many things
away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
except the prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowly learning.

Mary Oliver, Thirst, Beacon Press, 2006

It’s not out there

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We have a habit of looking in the wrong place for contentment. We tend to look outside ourselves, seeing others’ lives and other places as possessing a greater level of happiness than we currently possess. This often leads us to instinctively compare, provoking a movement within us that happens in a flash and then prompts the telling of a story about ourselves and about life, which leads to our mood going down. As I have written before, we end up comparing our present self to a better self, or to the ideal portrayal of lives which we find in society or which our insecurities about ourselves have generated. We find that a lot of our anxieties arise because we are trying to match up to what we think our life “should” be like, or what others portray as being happy.

It is easy to fall into this trap when we travel. We see a different from of life, maybe faster and more “exciting” than our own, or houses situated in a better location, or places of quiet that seem much more peaceful than where we live. So we lean towards those things, or we leave ourselves, not realizing that true contentment is found within. We get caught in idealized views of what is possible for ourselves and travel far in our minds and in our spirits from where we actually are. And this often means we end up thinking that something must be wrong with our  lives or with us.

Meditation practice is a training in learning to stay, staying with ourselves, not running outside ourselves after every passing stimulus about things which will pass away. It helps us to not attach too much solidity to these comparing thoughts, letting them pass through our minds without hooking on to them. We realize that they do not bring the contentment they seem to suggest. It helps us seek real happiness within, where we already are.

The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely…is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay or…learning to come back, to return to the present over and over again.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap