May you be present in what you do.
May you never become lost in the bland absences.
May the day never burden you.
May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams,
Possibilities and promises.
May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.
May you go into the night blessed, sheltered and protected.
May your soul calm, console and renew you.
John O’Donoghue, May the light of your soul gude you
As I mentioned in yesterdays post, at times our best plans get disrupted and we are faced with uncertainty. Sometimes these changes come from new ideas within ourselves which may be easier to deal with than those which are obliged on us, by the changing minds or circumstances of others. However, at the end of the day, all changes to our plans can be a challenge. If we are very attached to our plans or if the changes affect some aspects of our identity, then the changes can shake us to the core.
Making plans is a necessary part of life. Although meditation can help us identify when we are continually planning as a strategy to deal with our anxiety, normal making of plans is necessary for us to be effective, to move forward in our work and to look after those we have a responsibility for. Therefore a certain amount of living in and imagining the future is appropriate and necessary for our lives.
However, if we make a plan too rigid, or become fixed on a certain way that the future has to turn out – or that others have to be – we can become too attached to a fixed notion of how the Universe should behave. As I have said before, this can make it hard to accept the diversions which reality takes from our own agenda. We believe things have to turn out in a certain way for them to be right. Thus we lose connection with how things actually are. We can even think we are running the show.
Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a boar.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.
I should be suspicious
Of what I want.
Rumi
Only a life lived for others
is a life worthwhile
Einstein
The trick is not how much pain you feel but how much joy you feel.
Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses not to love, excuses, excuses, excuses.
Erica Jong
I faciliated a Day Silent Retreat this weekend which was really a lovely gentle experience. It 
passed so quickly and all participants expressed a deep contentment with the day and the time they had spent silently sitting or walking. It really confirmed for me how finding some time for quiet in our lives is not a luxury but rather is essential for protecting our health.
Retreat days and reflection aims to develop our capacity to drop into our lives as they actually are. However, sometimes, they can feed into our ever-present need to change or fix ourselves. If this happens, our awareness of self can become a full-time preoccupation and take away some of the naturalness of life. It is good that we try to change in ways that allow us become more healthy and happy, but sometimes we can feel pressure to change because of an unconscious sense that we are not good enough or we are unacceptable as we are. Some of the self-help culture visible today feeds into this unhappiness with how we actually are, by continually encouraging us to take on one self-improvement after another. And even noble self-improvement projects, such as “I want to be more calm“, or “I want to be more happy“, can simply substitute one type of discontent with ourselves with another. The reason they do this is that they actually strengthen our premise that we are broken and need fixing.
Even sometimes the reason we come to meditation is precisely because we want to change something inside us. We wish to be calmer, better, more spiritual, more together, more integrated. And if we examine deep enough under that wish we will find that it arisies from a belief that there is something wrong with us as we are. We look to put order on the parts of ourselves that frighten us.
But real life is not necessarily ordered; it is immediate, messy, incomplete. We are in danger of taking things too seriously and not allowing enough room for our chaotic and playful side. Part of the joy and spice of life comes from seeing that our mistakes and wrong turns, our compulsions to do too much, or our tendency to veg out, all add up to our unique personality. The end goal of all our work is not to become some ideal version of ourselves, based on ideas passed on by others or in books. We are to become ourselves fully, with all our quirks and exaggerations. Our natural selves, unaffected; not the one where we pass the time continually checking in on how are doing.
The only way out of this struggle is to leave our mind alone, to fully accept the mind that we have, anger, dualisms and all. And when we no longer judge ourselves or try to emotionally neuter ourselves, the internal conflicts and tensions gradually begin to quiet down. We might say this is the most basic psychological insight: I cannot escape myself, so I have to come to terms with the mind that I have.
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
I am reading some books by Stephen Levine. He has worked extensively with those who 
are dying, and writes about grief and loss. What he has found is that many arrive at the end of their life with regrets, wishing that they had done this or that, lived more fully here or there, realized their potential in this way or that. This has led him to emphasize living each moment fully, not limiting ourselves in this moment to our past or waiting for our future, in order to have no regrets:
Most of life only lasts a moment. Then our life becomes a memory, a dream. We are only alive a millisecond at at time. This moment! Or as one teacher put it, holding his thumb and forefinger about a quarter inch apart, “All of life is only just this much–just a moment in time.” When we open to this very instant in which awareness produces consciousness, we are fully alive. Completely preent. Big-minded.
To the degree we are present for “just this much” this living moment, we are alive. Otherwise we numb to the vibrancy and beg upon our deathbed for one more chance.
Most think that living a “full life” means living into old age. But if you are not alive this moment, what makes you think you’ll be alive then? To live fully is to be filled with this moment. Present for this millisecond, this day, this week, this life.”
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Embracing the Beloved
In this he echoes the words of Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness. He too draws attention to not neglecting to do the things we want, to dare to choose certain paths that open up in front of us.
... most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies show that nine out of ten people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.
Mindfulbalance 