Heaven

I'm a believer, but I've never felt as if the tools we're given in this life are sufficient to understand what lies beyond. But recently I've discerned a definition of heaven that doesn't feel earthbound.

Heaven is a place where all the people you've ever loved are happy.

Serenity Prayer

I came of age in the 60's and the 70's, and the Serenity Prayer was a bit of a cliche. That powerful mantra that helped so many people get their lives back from all sort of addiction and abuse became trite. So it's receded into a cobwebbed corner of my mind.

Time to dust it off. I tend to be full of misbegotten courage to change the things I think I can. But I'm coming up way short on the acceptance and wisdom parts. I am, more and more, trying to operate outside what the motivational speakers call my "circle of influence."

I don't exactly know why, but I sense that I do need to figure out the reasons before this will be fixed.

Regression

Lessons that should become easier with time are frustratingly difficult to learn.

Eigenzeit indeed. It takes so little for the conviction that taking control of one's own time is important to be bulldozed by an army of opposing forces: things that scream to be done, and the belief (deep somewhere in my bones) that to stand in the way of these demands is selfish, childish and unrealistic.

Until something takes over my body and my soul and demands that I stop.

My father says that I have such a poor memory because I don't look back. "She lives in the here and now," says he. I wish it were so. The ugly truth is that I don't remember anything because I'm never really present when things happen. I'm in the future. Planning, obsessing, worrying, strategizing. It seems like a harmless enough game, but that's an illusion.

I woke up yesterday and realized that it had probably been days since I had taken a deep breath. One of the symptoms of living in the future: forgetting that your body can't leave the present. And the first thing that happens when I breathe deep is that I cry. For absolutely no reason. Nothing is terribly wrong. Many things are amazingly right.

Those people for whom mindfulness is a way of life: how do they get there? Were they closer to start with than the rest of us? Is their will so much stronger? Do they trust more?

All of that self-discipline that's lavished on the to-do list needs to be redirected.

Morning Person

I always thought that one of the signs that I had become a true grown-up would be my transformation into a Morning Person. Sadly, I’ve almost never spontaneously risen earlier than I absolutely have to. Occasionally, though, when I have to rise before the sun (as I did this morning to catch an early train to New York), I catch a glimpse of the clarity and calm that Morning People call their own. And on days like today, I promise myself that I will finally become one of them. It’s a game I play with myself, but for a few hours, it feels like real life.