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Today's
quotation:
Do we
need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the
blue sky? Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it?
No, we just enjoy
it. Each second, each minute of our lives can be
like this.
Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to
enjoy the sunshine,
the presence of each other, even the sensation
of our breathing.
We don't need to go
to China to enjoy the
blue sky. We don't have to travel into the
future to enjoy
our breathing. We can be in touch with these
things right now.
Thich Nhat Hanh
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Today's
Meditation:
"Each
second of our lives can be like this." Can it
really be true that we can fill every single moment of our
lives with wonder and appreciation for the beautiful
things in our lives? Is it possible for us to live
our lives in a perpetual state of gratitude and
appreciation? To be honest, I believe it is.
What's the secret of reaching that point? Lots and
lots of effort, I think, in order to cast off our ideas of
how we think things should be and accept things for the
way that they are. Only then will we see the beauty
in everything and everyone around us.
When
we do reach that point, we'll start to see just how sacred
is the life that surrounds us all the time, just how
beautiful everything around us is. Emerson wrote
once that we start to think that life would be great if we
just lived in some exotic place like Venice, so we pack
our bags and sell our stuff and move to Venice. When
we get there, though, we find that Venice is very nice,
but we're still the person we were before we left, and
life is very much the same for us no matter how exotic
our surroundings. How we see the world is more
important than what our surroundings look like.
Enjoyment
and appreciation are matters of choice.
"Wherever we are, we have the capacity to enjoy the
sunshine." Wherever we are, and whenever we're
there. It's pretty simple, yet so hard to put into
practice. It takes work, and it takes constant
effort. It takes opening our minds and our hearts to
the possibility of seeing--truly seeing--our surroundings
and all that they hold.
Why
should we have to go somewhere else to be happy, when
there's so much right where we are that could make us so,
if only we were to allow it all to make us happy?
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