Our experience of living is like water, cupped in palm of our hand. The more you try in desperation to hold onto it, the more it slips between your fingers. Luckily, there is plenty more just below your waist. It will never be the water you once held in your hand, but all you have to do, is dip your hand back in the ocean, and draw out some more.
To be happy, you need to come to terms with the fact that you are not in control.
Everything is borrowed and transitory. Short term. A tent, not a pyramid.
And that’s a good thing.
I’m not sure how many more heartbreaks, shootings, senseless slaps across the face, disease, or people’s brokenness, numbness, and hatred I can see and hear about.
Thankfully, we are only tiny part of the universe, and thank God, for the infinite majesty of space. Thank God for the courage not to take ourselves too seriously.
Thank God for rule number 6.
Our very lives depend on our heart and its health, but we have so very little to do with it. We owe a debt of gratitude to our parents for giving us a heart, and one day in the distant or not so distant future, that heart will decide to stop. It will all end. But in the meantime, you and I are given the task to speed it up, or to slow it down.
I think that is what life is all about.
It’s not about being born. It’s not about dying. It’s what you do in between.
It’s about the speeding up and the slowing down.
Your entire life is a collection of events and memories enthroned with a continuous wave of ups and downs. Just like a heart monitor, monitoring your pulse and blood pressure.
Up. Down. Up. Down.
We are unhappy on either end of the monitor. We get uncomfortable on the down swing, and we get oh so nervous on the upswing. We dream of things getting better, and we fear things getting worse. It seems we love the middle. We are most comfortable and happy, right in the very middle.
It doesn’t matter where we are, or how long we have been there; how old we are, how smart, what race, sex, orientation, or religious affiliation.
It doesn’t seem to matter in the least.
We all carry with us, the blinding illusion of control. Of mine and yours. Of right and wrong. Of this and that.
We are stubborn and audacious. We demand much of life, and we speak to her like a servant. We ask her for things, like a spoiled child, and we demand quick answers. We stomp our feet, clap our hands, and place unyielding demands on our life.
In truth, it is life that gets to ask us questions.
How do you like the changing of the seasons? Can you change and adapt? How do you like the people I have placed in your path? Can you learn and grow?
What will you do with an irregular heart beat? With a monarch butterfly? The discovery of new planets? The extinction of another species? With a disease that strips you of your immune system?
What will you do with a drunk and violent husband? A cold uncaring wife? With beautifully autistic children? An angry sister in law? Childish presidents? And the sudden death of beloved celebrities?
What will you do?
What will you think, when you know you are not in control.
You weren’t here once and you won’t be here, one day.
But you are here right now.
Carpe Diem.
What do you want to do?
When you get cancer, do you want to go for a run across the country? When you are thrown in prison for twenty-seven years, do you want to become a world leader? When your wife leaves you, do you still want to remain in a good relationship with the mother of your children?
Stop and listen.
Y our life is not a test. Don’t believe the false illusion of dwarf minds.
Life is not a test.
But she asks and demands answers to many questions.
Many magnificent but often painful questions.
It all leads towards something.
It seems to point in some benevolent direction.
Take courage that you are not in control.
Let go. Leap forward.
You get to decide.
Decide to be live. To answer her questions, and be ready and grateful for some more.
