|
Today's
Meditation:
Sometimes
I feel like a seed in the earth--buried under the ground,
unable to see the sunlight or the stars, unable to feel the
breeze and the sunshine. But what does that seed
do? It grows and becomes something else that emerges
from the darkness to dwell in the sunshine and the
breezes. The seed doesn't despair, of course, because
it doesn't think--it just does what it does. We, on
the other hand, tend to overthink our situations and we
often lose hope because of this tendency. We make ourselves
feel miserable because we can't see the sunshine and the
starlight that are in our future if we just keep on keeping
on, and we allow ourselves to grow and develop and become
something more tomorrow than we are today.
One
of the most important life rules that I've learned is that
things outside ourselves shouldn't "give us"
hope--hope comes from inside, and it's a natural part of who
we are. Sometimes, the tank runs nearly empty.
Then we see or hear or experience something that makes us
feel hope once more, but that feeling has been inside us,
being pushed down and repressed by things like fear and ego
and depression and anxiety. What we need to do is to
access our hope much more often so that we make it stronger,
so that it becomes an important part of our everyday lives.
Sometimes
we allow ourselves to get too caught up in our hopes based
on incomplete information. We may hope for a certain
job (or relationship) and not get it, not realizing that the
other job that we get may be more important for us as a
learning experience right now, even while we still hope for
the dream job. What I've learned, though, is that we
may just find that dream job in the job that we thought we
didn't want--if we allow ourselves to be open to the
experience and make ourselves do our absolute best at the
job. Our hopes weren't dashed when we didn't get the
other job--we simply learned that very often they're
misplaced.
Rather
than hoping for a certain something, I hope for a better
me. Rather than hoping for things to turn out the way
I think they should, I hope that they'll turn out in ways
that are best for everyone. Change is a constant in
life, and let's hope that the changes we face help us to
learn and grow rather than hoping that they turn out the
ways we think they should.
|
