Allowing life to unfold
Dear All,
I share these words with you in love, in the hope that they may serve as a loving and gentle reminder to remember what is truly important in life, in your life.
It is a sunny morning, I am sitting outside during my daily meditation practice and I experience an enormous difficulty in concentrating, all kinds of thoughts race through my head and an enormous influx of inspiration keeps visiting me. I try with all my might to find the focus but every time I have a light moment of concentration there is yet another new thought that manages to seduce me. Slowly, I become aware of everything that is happening around me; a bird that is singing loudly on the edge of the dormer window and seems to be addressing the world with all its enthusiasm as if it is asking us to sing the day with just as much joy, a spider that is putting the last hairy touch to a beautiful woven construction, I hear something rustling in the leaves but I cannot see what it is exactly, perhaps a friendly ground crawler, there are flowers that are opening up and make a sun salutation to the warm star in the sky, I hear a dog barking nervously, a horse sighing deeply and all this is alternated with a deafening noise of passing cars on the highway further on. It is clear, the awakening world in all its forms knows beautiful ways to slowly reveal itself into a new day.
As I sit there, struggling to concentrate, I think about how beautiful it is if we allow life to unfold to us and that my diligent attempt to call myself into control with all my might is somehow a contradictory movement to how life manifests itself. There I sit, with all my might I try to call myself into concentration, I try to grab that focus to get into the silence and this while everything around me is simply unfolding, without effort, without forcing. No, I apparently do not let (my) life unfold but try to control it myself, at least, that is the illusion I apparently live under. Whilst all of this is happening, I realise the sheer beauty, the beauty of how we can let life unfold, when we dare to surrender to this great, ever-unfolding, ever-revealing phenomenon we have come to call life. We don’t have to fight it, we can’t understand it, let alone control it. But, we can go along with it when we allow ourselves to be moved, spun like a thread in a cosmic web, sung like a note in the soft morning glory, a dance in which we cannot help but move once we begin to hear the harmony.
“The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are.”
Dear friend, all that life seems to ask of us is to let go, to let go of the idea that it needs to be grasped by any attempt to control it, to let go in the trust that life will unfold in its predestined way anyway, but that the way we experience it depends only on the extent to which we allow it. In Eastern wisdom they might say: "as to blow in the wind" or "be a leaf in the river", flow with that ever-moving current and then, just maybe, we can experience something of the grandeur of life. The grandeur that no man can master, that no practice can control but that the birds sing about, that is reflected in the ingenious design of the spider, that dogs get nervous about, that horses sigh deeply about and that everyone on the highway drives away from: the great mystery that can only be merged with when we allow life to unfold to and within us.
In love and reverence, sven
