What counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world? My cup brims over before I have time to desire. Eternity is there and I was hoping for it. What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness.
Albert Camus, Essays
When entering a supermarket store on Saturday I was greeted with a banner telling me that shopping there would make this Christmas “the most perfect ever”. This desire for perfect conditions is necessary when we are young, in order to allow the development of a stable self. As the English psychoanalyst Winnicott said, “the mind has a root in the need of the individual, at the core of the self, for a perfect environment”. However, as the child grows, its capacity to live with a less than perfect environment develops and the mother just has to be “good enough” in an ongoing committed relationship rather than being perfect in every instance. And it is the same for us as adults.
Our lives are always a work in progress, with moments of failing followed by repairing, integration mixed with disintegration. Despite what we sometimes think and express from time to time, we don’t really need perfection. We push ourselves hard enough due to that false belief. That things go wrong – despite our best efforts – is just part of the human condition. What we really want is to be seen as we are – not completely sorted out – and for that to be good enough.
It’s odd in a way, this business of Perfect Christmasses. The story of the first Christmas is the story of a series of completely unplanned, messy events – a surprise pregnancy, an unexpected journey that’s got to be made, a complete muddle over the hotel accommodation when you get there… Not exactly a perfect holiday.
But it tells us something really vital. We try to plan all this stuff and stay in charge, and too often (especially with advertisers singing in our ears the whole time) we think that unless we can cook the perfect dinner, organise the perfect Christmas, we somehow don’t really count or we can’t hold our heads up. But in the complete mess of the first Christmas, God says, ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to wait until you’ve got everything sorted out perfectly before I get involved with you. I’m already there for you in the middle of it all, and if you just let yourself lean on me a bit instead of trying to make yourself and everything around you perfect by your own efforts, everyone will feel a little more of my love flowing’.
Archbishop of Canterbury, Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2.
There is great psychological wisdom in the ancient texts as to how to deal with the strong emotions stirred up by challenges we face every day. Being able to see, without making it a story about ourselves:
You shouldn’t chase after the past, and don’t place expectations on the future.
The past no longer is. The future has not yet come.
Whatever is present in life as it is in the very here and now
you clearly see, right there, right there.
Not taken in. You dwell in stability and freedom
That’s how you develop the heart.
The Buddha, Bhaddekaratta Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya No.131.
I follow four principles:
Face it,
Accept it,
Deal with it,
Then let it go.
Sheng Yen, 1930 – 2009, Chinese Buddhist monk
What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol (The Divine Voice). You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’ It’s very compassionate at this stage. More than at any time of my life, I no longer have that voice that says, ‘You’re fucking up.’ That’s a tremendous blessing, really.
Leonard Cohen’s wisdom as he gets older and is more aware of his mortality
photo taken from leonardcohen.com
We like to think – going into work this day – that we might get the opportunity to do something profound and meaningful that will change lives and impact upon policy. Or that we will change people in ways that will bring them closer to our point of view and values. And maybe we will. However, in the meanwhile, we will get lots of ordinary opportunities – to be kind or to listen – small things which we can overlook, but if we do with love, can have a real impact upon persons.
[Thomas Merton] once met a Zen novice who had just finished his first year in the monastery. Merton asked the novice what he had learned during the course of the novitiate, half expecting to hear about encounters with enlightenment, discoveries of the spirit, perhaps even altered states of consciousness. But the novice replied that during his first year in the contemplative life he had simply learned to open and close doors.
“Learned to open and close doors” Merton loved the answer and often retold the story, for it exemplified for him “play” at its very best – doing the ordinary while being absorbed in it intensely and utterly.
Haase, A., Living the Lord’s Prayer: The Way of the Disciple
photo enfo
