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Today's
Meditation:
This is one
of my favorite quotations of all time, as much for its
depth and veracity as for its simplicity. How much
of what we see each day is a result of our learning and
training, and how much of it is a result of our senses
telling us what's truly there? We may see a kid
who's being obnoxious, and we've been taught to dislike
that particular thing, but perhaps what we're really
seeing is a kid who's afraid and lonely, and who's just
acting out in inappropriate ways because he or she has
never been taught how to seek help in appropriate ways.
Is
that a wall in your living room, or is it an opportunity
for expression? Is this rainstorm something that's
going to ruin your picnic and force you to go indoors, or
is it something that can help you to open your eyes to the
beauty and wonder of experiencing the rain on your skin
and the wind in your wet hair? Is that smile a sign
of friendliness, or something else? If we allow
ourselves to realize that much of what we see is the
result of conditioning, we can gain a whole new
perspective on the world--and its beauty and wonder can
shine through even more brilliantly.
Rilke
said "Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are
princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful
and brave." The obstacles we face are
opportunities for learning; the ugly things have much
beauty in them if we only learn how to actually see
it. But we cling to the things that other people
have taught us, without ever asking ourselves if those
people had the slightest idea of what they were talking
about, about what they were teaching us. One of the
most important learning moments in my life was coming to
the realization that many of my teachers had absolutely no
clue about what they were talking about-- and that's why
the old saying says to take everything we hear with a
grain of salt.
This
doesn't mean that we can't believe anything that we were
taught, of course. But it does mean that we need to
realize that the people who taught us about how to see the
world might have actually seen things differently than we
do. Our goal in life should be to see the world in
the ways that we were born to see it, and not to adopt the
ways that other people were born to see it. What is
truly in front of us is far too important for us to miss
it simply because we don't see it properly.
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