Our continual mistake is that we do not concentrate upon the present day, the actual hour, of our life; we live in the past or the future;
We are continually expecting the coming of some special hour when our life shall unfold itself in its full significance.
And we do not observe that life is flowing like water through our fingers, sifting like precious grains from a loosely fastened bag.
Alexander Elchaninov, 1881 – 1943, Russian Orthodox priest
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living.
Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
a new month begins…
imagine! imagine!
The wild and wondrous journeys
still to be ours
Mary Oliver, Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me [extract]
A lovely image of the solid ground we strive for:
By effort and conscious awareness [Apramāda],
discipline and self-mastery,
a wise person makes for themselves
an island which no flood can overwhelm.
The Dhammapada, 2.25
One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite teachers: “Most things do not matter very much. The rest do not matter at all!” (Stylianos Ateshlis, aka Daskolos). I read it not cynically, but in the form of a statement not to worry so much over this and that. There is a bigger picture, and, I imagine it to be one in which all is well, and all will be well.
Right within each and every one of us the whole creation is thrumming freshly formed and alive. Enjoy that!
Gil Hedley, founder of the Somanautics Workshop approach to the body. [from the Alive on All Channels blog]
You are so knitted into a day. You are within it; the day is as close as your skin. It is around your eyes; it is inside your mind. The day moves you, often it can weigh you down; or again it can raise you up. Yet the amazing fact is: this day vanishes. When you look behind you, you do not see your past standing there in a series of day shapes. You cannot wander back through the gallery of your past. Your days have disappeared silently and for ever. Your future time has not arrived yet. The only ground of time is the present moment.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara
Mindfulbalance 