Life's
Absurdities
“...I've
long thought that the greatest therapists and true spiritual teachers
are comedians, advocates of a comic sense of life, who break open our
serious efforts to arrange life as we think is best.”
Thomas
Moore (The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life)
Do
you ever picture the gods sitting up on Mount Olympus, laughing among
themselves, and coming up with various experiments to see how we will
react. “Hey, let's put fifteen road blocks in her way and see what
happens!” They love it when we very carefully make our plans and
achieve our goals toward an outcome, only to have the whole house of
cards come tumbling down. We poor humans are like lab rats, just
trying to stay away from the shocking mechanism long enough to get a
bit of food. At least, that's how it seems at times.
It
helps to have a sense of humor. In fact, it's critical to have the
ability to laugh at oneself. When we are unable to see the
absurdities in life, to appreciate all the lengths we humans go to in
our efforts to arrange life to suit us, we only become bitter and
dismayed. We have tremendous difficulty accepting the possibility
that there are other, greater energies at work in the the world, and
in our lives, that hold equal power. Most of us are able to look at
another person's life and say, “It was her destiny to do that,”
or “He is fated to be such-and-such.” But when it comes to our
own destiny, or to fate's tug on our own lives, we pull and wrestle,
and become obstinate and frustrated.
I
have a rule-of-thumb: never say never—it gives the gods a starting
place. If you say, “I will never...” they say, “Oh, really,
we'll see about that!” and if you state an absolute, “I will
be/do...” look out; their game is to out-do one another in dreaming
up obstacles. If we can get to the point that we allow life to flow,
allow destiny to be fulfilled, accept fate's determined claim, we
will find that what we never wanted, what we were determined to do
without is rewarding beyond our wildest dreams. It may not come in
the package we thought it would, but never the less the gift is
glorious and comes straight from the gods.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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