Today's
Meditation:
We
spend so much of our lives trying to plan them out, to make
them into what we think they should be. We put money in the
bank so our kid can go to college, then that child decides
to do something else instead. We form in our minds
exactly what our daughter-in-law will be like, only to
discover that our son is gay. We plan to travel with
our spouse three summers from now to make up for all the
time we've spent working, but cancer gets in the way and we
lose that spouse before we're able to do so.
So
much of our despair in life has to do with ideas that we've
built up ourselves about what life should be, about what we
want to have happen, about the results that we think we should be
getting for our efforts. We fail to keep in mind that
life may have its own plans for us, that the river of life
is going to be hitting some twists and turns--and even some
dams--along its journey, and we have to be ready for them.
We
can always use the college money to help our child start his
or her own business, or even use it to do some traveling
ourselves, rather than focus on the disappointment of our
child not doing what we expected. We can get to know
our new son-in-law well, and be glad that our child has
found someone who makes him happy. We can use our
resources to do things that we know our departed spouse
would have wanted us to do, or set up a charitable
organization in his or her honor--even a modest amount of
money in a scholarship fund would be a great contribution to
the world.
When
I was laid off from a job that I had planned to be at for
years--and we had even just bought a house--my first thought
was, "Okay, life's pushing me in a new direction
now. I need to stay alert to find out what that
direction is." I spent my unemployed time trying
to better myself and to improve resources that I had
available to me, and ended up having one of my best years
teaching in a place I never thought I would teach with some
wonderful people.
Life shouldn't be what we expect it to be--it should be what
it is. And we can do ourselves a great favor if we
stop trying to make it what we want it to be, accept it for
what it is, and discover in its essence the joys and the
pleasures that are there for us. Because they are
there for us--sometimes we just have to dig a little to find
them.
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