the little bundle of truth

If I could share one bundled truth secret I wish someone had told me and that I’d had the wisdom to understand, the kind of truth that your life might depend on one day, it would be this:

Never despair.  Never give up because there is an end in sight.  Never give up on yourself.  Never give up on warmth.  Ends are illusions.  Everything transitions.  Nothing ever “ends” so much as transforms from one state to another.  I didn’t start my job, the job was already there, I just slid into it, and went from a non-jobbed to a jobbed person.  The next stage is always the child of its predecessor stage.  If you’re paying attention, what emerges from the transition is an ever-revolving better version of what you’d previously attempted.  The trick is to be not too relaxed, not too taut.  If you are relaxed and disciplined, it is ideal to see a way of using that perception to build instead of destroy.  You will move forward seeing where you step next.

Too many see life going backwards, they look to their past while dreaming of their future, all the while stumbling around in the present making deeper knots with the threads of love they thrash around and tear.  While many things in life are not “the end of the world” everything has its weight.  You cannot face what’s behind and hope to see what’s in front while you keep moving all the while.  And you never stop moving, whether you choose to or not, time ticks away.  But never despair.  What begins is never lost.  What arises will cease.  What cannot arise, cannot cease.

The poison of life’s pain is also the very medicine that gives you opportunity to heal your mind.  It’s because you can see conditions of crisis as fortuitous when you are calm and clear.  When you’re not in the way of the experience, the knots rising are the very opportunity you so wanted to resolve the terrible wound inside you.  A better more beneficial system can take fill the vacuum of uncertainty that crisis creates.  We tend to only feel crisis in a passive tense, as what it takes from us.  But the crisis itself is no more the end than a wave meeting the shore is the end of water.

Make the best of this truth by always siding with the part of you that is courageous and giving.  Warmth is the key to kindness.  You can be stern, and even not talk much, but if you’re warm even a lost stray sick dog will know you are trying to help it.  It may not like that you have to give it pills and baths, but if it has been on the streets all this time, there is a clean-up healing phase.  When you start to come to the knots, don’t despair, it is not the center.  The knot is the opportunity to handle it, the pain doesn’t last forever.  It never does.

In Robert Frost’s immortal words, “I could sum the whole of life I’ve learned in three words: It Goes On.” The edge of the knife that can stab and kill is the same edge that can clean.  Respect, don’t fear.  The tool is not the goal.  And how you get there matters, if you can’t stay cool, stay true.  Know the difference.

Posted in: no mud no lotus