Give yourself a good time.
“Nights of anguish, why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you, Inconsolable sisters, and, surrounding, lose myself in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really, seasons of us, our winter” -Rilke
The seasons, the suffering, the joy, the sorrow - it’s all part of the curriculum of being a human. On joy and sorrow, Khalil Gibran says: “Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”
Remembering that the changes of our life are an impersonal stream of experience, Zen Master Dogen says:
Impermanence is Buddha-Nature
It’s the only thing we need to keep in mind. Impermanence isn’t just another interesting concept, but a precondition for existence. If you look you closely, you see it permeating everything, constantly. Holding tightly to a fixed and rigid perception of how things ought to be means you’re living against the law! Lama Thubten Yeshe urges us to look closely if we think there is something to hold on to.
“To gain a correct picture of reality, it is necessary to investigate deeply and try to find out exactly where this ‘I’ resides. When we make a thorough search for our self, looking throughout our entire body and nervous system, we can never find it.”
Our life is the season that never comes, a stream of becoming. Our nature isn’t good or bad, but change itself. There are definite patterns to our experience, rhythms of our body-mind, so why not carve out a habit of love?
“All you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors…all I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect.” -Sri Nisargadatta
So please - give yourself a good time.
It is as it is.
-Sasha