Can you live in the moment?
I have recently been blessed and honored to have two guest bloggers, Peter, from There's a Part of me, and Paula, from Everyday Radiance, on my blog. They shared two well written and thought provoking posts True Colors and True Colors; a Polarity respectively. I am looking forward to having more guest bloggers sharing their feelings and perspective on some interesting topics as well.
My dear friend Judy recently published a book, Dancing in the Shadows of Love, which I am enjoying reading at the moment. She offered her followers a chance to write a guest post for their blogs and with her being such a good writer, how could I refuse. I am thrilled that she wrote the below post and hope that you will all enjoy it as much as I have.
Moment to Moment by Judy Croome
In today’s busy world, how often do we attempt to juggle the different activities — our jobs, our families, our personal goals — in our lives?
If your life is anything like mine, I’m constantly manipulating my time. I steal a moment here to tackle that load of dirty washing or a moment there to do some writing, all the while trying to keep a sense of balance and order in my life.
Often I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of being fractured by all the demands placed on me.
“Stop!” I want to yell (and sometimes do!) “I’m only one person!”
Usually I crack when I’ve forgotten an essential component of living a harmonious life: our ordinary human lives are both exquisitely important and disappointingly insignificant.
Understanding this fundamental paradox of human existence is the key to keeping our inner balance while meeting the persistent demands on our time.
To us, the incapacitated father, the job deadline or the rush to prepare the perfect religious celebration, are overwhelmingly important. However, in the time-line of the evolution of humankind, they are all less than pinpricks.
They may feel like the thrust of a sharp steel sword, cutting up our serenity and throwing us off balance. But, really, they are pinpricks in comparison to events that affect the universal human condition.
What is my beloved Dad’s brain-stem stroke, which has left him with limited functionality, compared to the wars that have ravaged our planet and our souls for millennia? What if he has to live this sad existence for another month, year or decade compared to the four-million-year life and death of a sun in a far-away galaxy?
“The sun is new every day,” said Heraclitus.
For what is today, cannot be tomorrow. With each moment that passes, everything is different. The change may be too small for us to notice—another word in my Dad’s already reduced vocabulary forgotten as another small synapse in his brain burns out—or it may be a tsunami of demands on our time and energy.
When we forget that no condition in this life is permanent, we start to live an unbalanced life. We scurry here and hurry there, attempting to juggle all the different balls of our life at once. We plan ahead. We try to control what is essentially fluid.
Life is not a series of separate balls to be kept in the air by a human juggler. Life is more like a river running from its source, high in the pure mountain air, sometimes calm, sometimes slow, often filled with hidden currents and rushing rapids that tend to knock us off-balance until, finally, the water sweeps back into the ocean from which all life originally emerged.
What if, when we feel exhausted, stressed, or hopeless, we stop juggling life and remember that the easiest way through a fast-flowing river is to step from stone to stone? What if we only concentrate on the moment that each stone reveals itself, showing us the safest way through the swirling, ever-changing waters?
So it is with our busy lives: when we accept that the best way of dealing with the pinpricks of life is to remember that whatever happens will pass in the morning, we can give up trying to control what happens around us. We can just flow from moment to moment, letting harmony return to our lives and joy to our souls.
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Judy Croome lives and writes in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was recently shortlisted in the African Writing Flash Fiction 2011 competition, and other short stories and poems have appeared in Itch-e Magazine and “Notes from Underground Anthology.” Her independently published novel, “Dancing in the Shadows of Love,” is available from Amazon.com and other bookstores. Visit Judy on her blog www.judycroome.blogspot.com
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Free Image from ClipArt
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