Going Through Changes – from Blogger to monk

Bright sunshine attends this morning as I sit down to write a weekly Blog post. And the sunlight, the beautiful time of year, and the fact that I can write this, freely, quickly and publish it immediately to be available, potentially, to readers all around the world, are all things I feel thankful for.

It’s true that my word, and our world has suddenly been disturbed and disrupted by the onset of a new reality, and that is genuinely unnerving. But it IS a reality, a new and different reality to be sure but nevertheless A reality. And we all need one of those.

So, it might be best to look at it this way, i.e. not to be frightened of the new reality that we can’t avoid, but rather to monitor how we are responding to the change, and to gradually MAKE the change from one reality to another.

In-between – which is where I suspect we all are right now – we are obviously going to be both fearful and confused. And this fearfulness and confusion can be very unpleasant, accumulative, and even create a sense of panic.

The problem here is one of time and timing. To panic is, as we know, to rush. For our minds and our breath and our hearts to rush and even spiral out of control.

But if we remember, and remind ourselves, that what is happening is a change from one reality into another reality, that this change can’t be done quickly but must be done gradually, and perhaps very slowly, as our minds and bodies and the world around us all adjust and finds its way to a new sense of structure, time and perspective. Then we can and will handle the change.

Some things of course have not changed, and we can be grateful for those and use those as a kind of ‘ballast’ as make these changes. The sun is still shining on Spring mornings, the blossoms are coming out on the trees, the birds are singing and we can still write our blogs and connect with eachother in ways that people of an earlier time would find unbelievable, and incredibly useful.

So, at this time of what seems to be a huge and sudden change, that might frighten us and might make us panic, it’s best to ‘take a long view’, slow down our thinking, our acting, our decision-making, our breathing, our heart beat and thereby our mind. Take this opportunity to do every little thing we do a little more slowly, a little more thoughtfully and carefully, thereby gleaning gifts from a difficult situation.

And if you are out of your usual routines, off-work, off-college, or off-school, then imagine you have been given the gift of living like a monk for a few weeks or even months.

If we learn to live more carefully now, in every little action and detail of our lives, we can take this gift from the new reality and use them to make the whole of our future lives, both alone and together, more beautiful.

Here’s a song with a chorus to keep in mind.

 

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