Too many hours and days and weeks have been spent drifting along the lifeless canals of social media, hoping, on a subconscious level, to be struck with a thunderbolt of holy inspiration. No thunderbolts. Not even silent flashes of lightning. Meanwhile, this human’s chronological age advances and that chronically hoped for life-changing awakening has not happened. Not in any noteworthy way.
But the time has not been completely wasted. Inspiring quotes, uplifting quotes, soul-nourishing quotes have left at least fleeting impressions on the mind and has kept that flickering flame of hope alive. Only just.
We cannot expect to feel fully charged with raging zeal and effervescent passion all the time. We must allow for the more languid and tepid phrases of life which, inconveniently, may sometimes last longer than we wish. But, it would help us to learn to be okay with that. In fact, it would help us to be okay with everything.
Alright, please don’t start howling in protest. I know you consider righteous indignation a virtue. I know you insist that condemnation of things and people that are so morally vacant a civic duty. Maybe even a god-given duty.
To be okay with everything, in my book, means being at peace with everything. Not having a quarrel with anything. I think we can achieve so much more when we stop quarrelling, when we stop all this mental and emotional fisticuffs that only antagonizes our souls and ruins our chance for peace among all.
But how do you change things if you don’t disapprove of them, and do so observably and if necessary, violently? Are we not to aspire for a better world? Better relationships? Better circumstances? Better health? Better housing? Better sanitation? Better governments? Better economies? Better environments? Better rehabilitation programs? Better nutrition? Better labour laws? Better working conditions? Better living conditions for the poor and homeless? In short, better everything?
Yes. Oh yes. We must aspire for better. Always and forever. The question is how. Fisticuffs ain’t gonna do it. I truly believe that peace is not just an outcome we aspire to, it is the way to such an outcome. As is happiness. As is freedom. As is success. As is anything worth aspiring to. I really don’t see how you can fight your way to peace. Or sadness your way to joy. Or poverty your way to wealth. Or enslave your way to freedom.
The undesirable state is not the way but it sure as hell is a catalyst for movement toward something more desirable, something better. Let’s not make the catalyst the method. An enzyme like ptyalin is a catalyst that’s needed for the breakdown of carbohydrates to simple sugars. Without it, this necessary breakdown to sugars that can be absorbed into the bloodstream and used as fuel for all the body’s functions would not happen.
Without the undesirable state, we would regress in the stagnant waters of non-growth. But we know that growth is necessary to stay alive.
Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.
Rumi, The Essential Rumi
So, we let the undesirable state, situation, circumstance, be the catalyst that transforms our languishing or hope-depleted souls into bubbling fountains of aspiration. For something better. Aspiration is the heat that kick-starts the reaction, the movement, the transformation from less desirable to more desirable.
And once we get to something better, we know that in order to stay alive, we must keep growing, so that from our new place, we will aspire to something even better. And so it goes on. The infinite and eternal and inevitable flow of life. Some refer to it as the Law of Impermanence. It is active whether you cooperate or not. So much better if you do. So much better if you, in collaboration with the Divine, set the aspiration. And so much better if you let the Divine take charge while you remain its faithful handmaid.
And thus, rather than drift in the lifeless canals of social media or any other lifeless canal we should find ourselves in, we might flourish in the forever agitating waters of our divinely ordained humanity.
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