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Today's
quotation:
Contentment. . . comes
as the
infallible result
of great acceptances,
great
humilities—of
not trying to make
ourselves this or that
(to conform to some dramatized version
of ourselves), but
of surrendering ourselves
to the fullness of life—of
letting life flow
through us.
David Grayson
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Today's
Meditation:
It
seems to go against the grain of all I've learned in life
to "surrender myself." After all,
surrendering implies losing and giving up, doesn't
it? It sounds like a very negative term in this day
and age in which we live. But as I grow older, I
learn that the definition that I've learned and accepted
for "surrender" isn't necessarily the right one,
and that the one that makes the most sense has more to do
with acceptance than it has to do with losing anything.
I
now try to surrender myself to the flow of life, trying to
accept what other people are doing as their contributions
to life, and trying not to impose my will on what they're
doing or trying to do. I try to allow myself to be
myself and not conform to what I think I should be.
I know that if I can truly accept myself and others
exactly as I am and give up my efforts to fit some sort of
mold that really isn't me, I can be much more content with
the life that I'm living.
I
can get much more out of life by going with the
flow. This doesn't mean that I become a passive
person who never expresses an opinion or tries to change
something that needs changing. Rather, it means that
I become someone who doesn't base my thoughts of
self-worth on what I think I should be and whether I'm
living up to that artificial standard. It means that
I recognize that I am an important part of the world with
a great contribution to make, but so are others. And
I can be more content with my own place in the world when
I accept the contributions of others without thinking that
I have to fix them or make them better.
Life
flows, with or without me. Do I flow with it and
enjoy the ride, or do I fight the current and guarantee my
own discontent?
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