I find myself surprised as I count my blessings this Thanksgiving to feel grateful for the many unasked-for changes that have defined my life recently. Change is coming, whether we like it or not. That is not meant to be a threat, but a statement of the nature of life. When we are able to set aside the very human temptation to resist unasked-for change, we open ourselves to the promise of becoming - which is something to be thankful for indeed.
For a week or two each autumn, my morning walk with the dogs is in synch with the dawn. Watching the sun come up can change your whole state of mind. But the thing about dawn is that if you’re not paying attention you can easily miss it. If you, like me, are considering how you might rearrange some furniture or are pondering what meals sound good for the coming week, you can look up and realize with some surprise that it’s no longer dark. You will have missed out on the power that the outer world has to change your inner world.
It's fairly easy to let go of control and allow life to go as it will go when everything's going great as it was for me on a recent pretty-perfect fall getaway. It turns out this is much harder to do when things aren't going at all the way you'd hoped they'd go.
As much as we’d like to, we do not have control over the direction that our lives will take. Often, what keeps us from freely flowing where life is taking us is our instance that things should be another way. Once we accepted that this - whatever this is - is the way we’re going, we might find that getting off the “main road” offers some amazing views that we would have missed otherwise.
This essay starts with what just might be the oldest and worst "Dad Joke" and ends with a life hack. If you keep finding yourself in the same annoying situations and would rather not - read on.
Sometimes a quote I've read dozens of times suddenly makes sense in a whole new way. The one I explore here, by Richard Rohr, did just this and gave me a new way to answer a question I'm asked a lot - "Why should I practice?"
When beginning something again, there is a temptation to fall back into the way things were before. Beginning anew - something I do twice a year with the course I teach as each new semester begins - is a much more life-giving way to begin again. When we get comfortable beginning anew, it is becomes more possible to embrace and explore every moment - even the ones that are not what we expected them to be - as a precious gift.
When the kids were little, we played a mash-up of “red light, green light” and “freeze dance” with them. My husband or I would sing, “You better go, go, go, go, go. You better go, go, go, go, go. You better go, go, go, go, go. Annnnnnnnddddddd STOP!” As much as the kids loved the craziness of all the going – wild dance moves, running in circles, spinning like tops – they loved stopping the most. They would freeze in hilarious poses that would inevitably fall apart in peals of laughter. As they played, they would quiver with anticipation for both the “STOP” and the resumption of the “Go go going.” The game needed both to be fun. So, I suspect, does each of our lives.
It's taken me years to learn that when creating a garden, what the space needs is way more important than any ideas or opinions I may have of what I want to plant there. In gardens, as in life, you have to work with the hand you’re dealt. You can't always get what you want, but you find that what you need can be even better.