Observer

Jon Kabat-Zinn On Coming to Our Senses

"It is time to choose life, and to reflect on what such a choice is asking of us. This choice is a nitty-gritty, moment-to-moment one, not some colossal or intimidating abstraction.

It is very close to the substance and substrate of our lives unfolding in whatever ways they do, inwardly in our thoughts and feelings, and outwardly in our words and deeds moment by moment by moment.

The world needs all its flowers, just as they are, and even though they bloom for only the briefest of moments, which we call a lifetime. It is our job to find out one by one and collectively what kind of flowers we are, and to share our unique beauty with the world in the precious time that we have, and to leave the children and grandchildren a legacy of wisdom and compassion embodied in the way we live, in our institutions, and in our honoring of our interconnectedness, at home and around the world.

Why not risk standing firmly for sanity in our lives and in our world, the inner and the outer a reflection of each other and of our genius as a species?

The creative and imaginative efforts and actions of every one of us count, and nothing less than the health of the world hangs in the balance. We could say that the world is literally and metaphorically dying for us as a species to come to our senses, and now is the time.

Now is the time for us to wake up to the fullness of our beauty, to get on with and amplify the work of healing ourselves, our societies, and the planet, building on everything worthy that has come before and that is flowering now. No intention is too small and no effort insignificant. Every step along the way counts. And ... every single one of us counts."

(from p.16, Coming to Our Senses - healing ourselves and the world through mindfulness© 2005 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, published by Hyperion, New York)

Shoot, I hate it when I find a quote that I think I like and then expect it to mean something spectacular for me and the planet, but then come down from the ego inflation I get out of it and find it lofty and smug. Even demanding. Judgmental. So you'll be surprised to find out that I don't agree with this and post it here because I don't, not because I do. Except for one thing. I do agree with one sentence and I put it in boldly. I don't think it is the planet that hangs in the balance. I don't. I think that life finds a way and will be the ultimate victor and if people turn out to be destroyers of life, we will get the boot off the planet like all of the dominant species prior to us. Some other species will get a chance to run for the gold.

Maybe this moment is here, it is time for me to personally make choices, conscious and mindful, but I can't say that for another. I can't see people as a collective because we are all so different, in unique places in our evolution. Peace is a reflection of a moment but not a way of living a life. We have been embattled for survival from the start. Why should we strive for anything else? Anything else we would never strive for.

It is trudging through trenches, climbing the faces of mountains, setting sail on ships, heartache, loss, begging for food, being raped and maimed, murdered. Depression and loss, pioneering, warring, enslavement that is the history and the poetry of humanity. The respite lies in the reflection.

And the planet, how it quakes and floods, folds over itself and moves it's parts, and it's winds knock things around and it's fires burn the forests and what it is doing is forming itself. And we mimic it.

I was talking to Royce this morning and asked do you ever feel like you're living another person's life? Do you ever look back and see where choices were made without you having one iota of thought about it? One can fuck another and a baby will come about. One can meet an acquaintance and then a marriage, One can get in a car and drive into a bridge abutment and die, one can find a stray cat and pay vet bills for 16 years, One can make a phone call and their whole world turn upside down, One can look for the lost and find they are found..... With not a moment of operating in the choice-making mindset.

Had I been conscious would I have made other choices for my life. Yes, without a doubt. And the bitch about that is I also know that in that life I am just as conflicted and as wanting, yearning, striving for life meaning, and uncertain survival, just as much as I am in this life.

"I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons." Jung, MDR