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Today's
quotation:
We
find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We
become
something new by ceasing to be something old.
This seems
to be close to the heart of that mystery.
I know no more now
than I ever did about the far side of
death as the last letting-go of all, but now I know that I
do not need to know, and that I do not need to be afraid
of not knowing. God knows. That is all that
matters.
Frederick
Buechner
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Today's
Meditation:
One
of the things that I most admire about the Zen perspective
on life is its focus on letting go. Letting go of
control, letting go of results, letting go of
"needing" to know things that truly are
unknowable. There are so many things that we don't
need to know, but we live in a culture in which knowledge
is "power," and information is king of
all. This idea keeps us thinking that there's some
kind of problem if we don't know a certain something or if
we're lacking a certain bit of information.
"We
hold fast by letting go." Letting go of our
attempts to control things, our attempts to maintain
control over every aspect of our life. We've all
heard the saying about if we love something, we should let
it go, and then we'll know whether it "belongs"
to us when we see whether it comes back to us. So
much of our discontent and our dissatisfaction comes from
our unwillingness to let go of trying to control things
and trying to cause just the results that we think should
occur.
I
know someone who tries to control things. I don't
know why he does so, but he tries to control his
children's every action. He seems to think that his
kids have to act a certain way in order to be doing things
"right." He thinks his wife has to do
things a certain way, and once when he came over to help
out with a project, he took over completely and did the
project himself, because it had to be done his way.
I guess this would be okay, but he certainly isn't a happy
person--his need to control things makes him miserable,
because he's constantly preoccupied about the possibility
that someone's doing something "wrong." He
wants to "know" that things will work out his
way.
If
he could learn about letting go, he would experience much
less stress in his life, and he would no longer be afraid
that things will work out in a way that's not
"right." There are so many things that he
cannot control and that he will never know, yet he's still
not willing to admit this. Once he does admit it and
relax a bit, he'll find life to be much more enjoyable,
because the burden of controlling the world will have
fallen from his shoulders.
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