streams of thought....march 21st, 2014

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

How many times has this happen to each of us?  No matter how many times we look at a situation… or a neighborhood… or a relationship… or a favorite book we will see something that we feel that we have never seen before. 

A patient was sitting on the end of the examining table in a surgeon’s office; where they wondered what is going to happen next.  A few months earlier, they had survived a major surgery that eradicated a cancerous growth.

Now as the patient was sitting in the office, they reflect about the subsequent procedures that they had to go through in the past few months.  The body was slowing and effectively losing weight… denying them of a life that they had known before… while their re-occurring infections had become a way of life.  No one really knows how to move while living a life that is always in question. Their body betraying them over and over.  Yet the surgeon said that there wasn’t a serious infection.  How can this be the patient thinks to themselves?  How can it be that the weekly packing of wounds is nothing more than a minor event?

 

We look at life differently at different stages of our lives.  We come into our adolescence with a reckless abandon.  We are no longer “young children” with limitations. We are now teenagers with developing dreams.  We begin the pilgrimage of discovery.

We get our first job and there is a sense of accomplishments when we receive that first paycheck.  We head out to spend it because now we have freedom to choose what we want to buy because after all it is our money.

We fall in love.  We dream of a life with another person for perhaps the first time. We wonder what life will be like and what kind of home we will have together.  We see them in our thoughts and carry them in our hearts.

We hold our first born.  We wonder if we will be the best parent.  We wonder if people will write books about our parenting skills or maybe we will do parenting seminars on how amazing we were as the mentors and guides in this brand new life.

We lose the first person that we ever felt close to.  We may have lost them through a variety of circumstances.  They may have left because of divorce… or separation… or an illness…. or perhaps even through death.  The pain is too great to carry.

We write our first blog or article. We wonder if anyone will read it. We wonder if anyone will laugh at the humor in it or be provoked to reflect on an inner aspect that had been hidden away.

We get the difficult news that we have cancer.  No one wants to hear the “C” word.  It is almost as if people will look at you with some level of pity; while all the while they are thinking that you are going to die.

Life is about discoveries.  We can sit on our comfy couch and watch Netflix or the Discovery Channel thinking that we are becoming enlighten. Or we can get out of the four walls that we call a home and immerse ourselves into life itself.  Life is more than just walking, sleeping, eating, crapping, pissing, and/or dreaming of something better.  Dreaming without action is nothing more than a fantasy.  It is when we engage and act upon those dreams that it actually becomes life… moments of reality.  

Rollo May writes, “…keep in mind that being is a participle, a verb form implying that someone is in the process…” (1983, p. 97)  Nature by its very own essence is in a state of process.  We celebrate seasons of change because the earth is constantly evolving.  It is when we stop discovering something new is when we are in danger of not living or at least not living in a dynamic way. This is a beautiful life that we have the opportunity to live.  I am reminded that a rabbi once said that we all have a phenomenal gift and it is when we do not exercise that gift will the world become a poorer place.

We will come face to face with chances to learn something new about ourselves, others, or the world in which we live in. We will encounter the uncertainty of the next moment.  It is an inevitable event.  So…

What will we do with it? 

What will we need to do so that we discover more deeply the person that we truly are meant and desire become? 

What is the one thing that we have conveniently ignored?

I pulled my car over the other day and walked around a neighborhood that I had driven through many times.  I soon noticed yards… porches… backyards… people in ways that I had never seen them before.  It was not that the landscape had changed but what changed was my own perspective.  Maybe, like the surgeon, we need to stop looking at the malady with the same perception as we had been looking at it for the past few months or years.  Maybe we need to not get upset with the person who almost ran us over as we crossed the intersection while we were jogging.  Perhaps, we need to stop and try to tell the other person’s story with the emotions and vision that they have about the subject; so, that we can have a better dialogue instead of an argument.

Life is not a static adventure.  It is an organic movement that demands our interaction for us to fully be present.

Breaking script….Namaste  

streams of thought...january 15th, 2014

What is one of your most favorite quotes?  I smile every time I read or hear one of Yogi Berra’s infamous lines.
“Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.”
“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps parents off the streets.”
Then there are the thought provoking ones like from Lao Tzu, “From caring comes courage.”  Or from Martin Luther King Jr., “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by bad people but the silence over that by good people.”
I am sure that with the beginning of the New Year we have all made personal promises to ourselves.  We may have even claimed a quote or set of quotes that we want to set before ourselves as self-motivating speeches. Words that have been put together by a single individual who has insight into the needs of a needy person. As soon as we claim a statement as our motivation, we declare our “need”.  A “need” that says I have an inner desire that requires an external stimulus.  I don’t think that there is anything wrong with having motivational quotes around your home or in your presence. In fact, I strongly suggest finding really great ones… great in the sense that they not only pacify but they push you past a point of discomfort and into awareness.
Sometimes we need to have an external voice that comes along with our inner voice and tells us that we can be more than we even dare to dream to be… now notice that I said “be” not “do”.
“Doing” is an action that is typically short lived while “being” is something that is reflected in how we interact with others.
The act of “doing” can often times be a pacifier. Often times we do things because we have this perception that we need validation.  Sometimes, we act out of a need to fill a void deep within ourselves. We may have never been given the gift of knowing how valuable we are; so we act in response to showing that we are worthy of being present. We accomplish many things in essence to make up for what we fundamentally needed… a deep sense of self validation. The problem with that is that when self-validation is satiated by doing something, we will constantly always have to do be doing something; when in reality we need to validate who we are by embracing our own intrinsic value.
Many times the act of being present is not by being seen but by being felt.  We are so deeply connected with the beauty and value of who we are that we have the space and energy to offer the same gift to another person.
The act of “doing” is often times seen as a necessary process of gaining something… a reward… a possession… a better “position” in life. If our purpose of acting is only to gain something then I am afraid that we have missed our greater gift.
Our greatest gift is our presence.
Thich Nhat Hahn once said, “The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
What is one of your favorite quotes? Mine is something that I heard a long time ago but it now has a new meaning for me.
“And the Word became Flesh…” - John 1.14
I understand the context that it was written but I think that we are missing a greater picture.
Here is what I see when I read that quote. Make your words an action. Live out what you believe in. If I want to be known for what I believe in then I need to reflect it by my own presence because it continues on by saying “and lived among us.”
I am very much a believer in acting not with judgment but with compassion.  I have a tendency to lose sight of that. It happens when I allow stress, anger, insecurities, and fear to sprout from the soil of my being.  The one thing that I am learning is that these emotions or thoughts that I consider as being negative and fight against are actually stern teachers that give me insight into who I am. It is not the presence of those emotions that I need to be aware of but I need to be aware of the reason that they are there.
Why am I stressed? Why am I angry? What am I insecure about? What am I afraid of?
These emotions are not meant to be weights that drown me into despair but are weights that I need to use as an exercise in becoming stronger.
Inwardly, I bow into the thought of allowing my words and thoughts becoming flesh.  Allow the One that came in the act of love and forgiveness be the Model for how I live out the rest of my life.
breaking script…..Namaste