Wordless in a World of Words

I have a love/hate relationship with words. On the one hand, they are an essential tool for human communication. They can be crafted into exquisite poems, lofty speeches, necessary instruction, entertaining stories. The downside, for me at least, is their woeful inadequacy when it comes to matters of spirit. There are things I have come to know, without a shadow of a doubt, in my 60 plus years of life in this world-- things I would love to share, to give others the peace that is now the undercurrent of my life, the calm and steady alertness that descends during times of trial. I am not the same person I was a couple decades ago. I remember how I used to be and I laugh at the contrast between then me and now me. Now, outwardly, this may or may not be a noticeable thing. My personality is still basically the same as it was when I was younger. I tend to overplan the day to day things, striving for a perfection I know I can never reach. I can exhibit impatience or lie awake worrying about this or that. The difference now, the big difference is that I am aware of this striving, perfectionistic personality but not totally identified with it. It amuses me, it is not my identity.  I notice it is clearly not packing the punch it used to in terms of anxiety and stress. Like a wheel after the foot has been taken off the accelerator, it keeps spinning but it is slowing down. Losing momentum. About time.

But, I digress. My frustration with words is the subject. I think about how I got here, in this good place, in this lovely inner land of gratefulness and acceptance and awareness of the beauty all around me. I want to share the route with everyone, email the Mapquest directions, give clear instructions how to get from point A to point B. But I cannot. One of those things I have learned, one of the beyond a shadow of doubt things, is that I cannot. Oh, I can give pointers. I can describe the cookie jar and hope it helps folks somehow get their hands on the cookies. But the truth is, I'm not even sure how I got here exactly. There were a lot of twists and turns, ups and downs, bad times and good times. It was, I now laughingly realize, a journey from here to here. No distance covered, no movement on the odometer, just a different perspective on life that has made all the difference. You can have it too. Pay attention to silence in this world of noise. Pay attention to the unseen in this world of many things. Pay attention to the wordless in this world of words. Just pay attention.

"Words are finite organs of the infinite mind.They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop and impoverish it."     

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Overwhelming Truths

I read an article this past week about the devastation and loss in Haiti due to the earthquake there earlier this year. Apparently, many of those who perished were young, educated people who worked in government or the private sector, or were going to university and had made the choice to stay in their home country of Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, instead of opting to emigrate to greener pastures abroad as did so many of their contemporaries. Many of Haiti's best and brightest young people lost their lives that fateful day, and the terrible sadness of that loss compounds when one considers the far reaching implications of this for Haiti as a nation, facing overwhelming odds as it seeks to rebuild amid the horrendous rubble.

Contemplating this scenario and the idea, in general, of recovery from any devastating disaster, whether that be a natural disaster or a personal one, I thought about the very natural tendency of human beings to become overwhelmed, how that state of anxiety is generated and how it actually impedes the process of recovery by reducing the energy available for the work that needs to be done. It comes down to our propensity for resisting what has happened and our habit of spinning out of control in our thoughts, which have a life of their own and can drown us in an ocean of despair. It becomes very important, then, to notice this mental phenomenon and understand how we sabotage ourselves, and our efforts to move on, at every turn. We look at our lives and think it shouldn't be this way and so we are, in effect, at war with what is, which is an incredible exercise in futility. What our lives are, they are. Cultivating non-resistance, then, could only have life enhancing consequences.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn." Each day, instead of being at war with what is, we could mindfully devote all of our energies to attending to whatever is in front of us at the moment, one thing at a time, one by one by one, with devotion and love and steadfastness, which qualities, in themselves, promote true joy of being. 

Grocery Shopping in Shoe Stores

I have a dear friend who is going through a tough time in her life right now.  She called me this week and we talked about the challenges she is facing and the anxiety it is producing in her.  She doesn't like the way anxiety has taken over her life and her resultant insecurity.  She said she seems to want reassurance from everyone that things will be okay, that everything will turn out alright.  I think she was feeling unsettled because even though many of her closest relatives and friends do, in fact, try to remain positive by telling her that things will be fine she continues to crave that reassurance even though she never feels satisfied when she gets it.  So many times in life we look out into the world and the people around us and say make me happy  or give me peace  or fulfill me.  Now, granted, we often have loving people in our lives who try to do exactly that, bless their hearts, but unfortunately your  happiness, your  peace, your  fulfillment is not theirs  to give and in many cases they are still looking for it themselves. They can then feel a certain resentment that they are being asked to provide something for somebody else that they are still lacking in their own lives. 

 The truth is, and we all know this, there are no guarantees for anything in life.  People have accidents, people get sick, people lose all their money, their houses, their possessions.  Some people die young or have to live with life changing disabilities.  Some people in this world live in unspeakably deplorable conditions or regularly suffer abuse at the hands of those who may hold power over them in one way or another.  The uncertainty of life scares us, sends us scurrying to find reassurance that we ourselves will not suffer.  Yet it is impossible for the world or anybody in it to give us a "free pass" from suffering.  The happiness, the peace, the fulfillment we crave cannot be obtained from the world; it is something that arises from within  us when we have squarely faced the unknown, taken time to be still, and have fully accepted where we happen to be and what we happen to be experiencing.   The persistence we have demonstrated in trying to obtain peace from the world without, where it is not, can then be re-directed to the world within  where it most certainly is.  We have been shopping in the wrong places.