Lessons
from the Nautilus
“The
nautilus is a deep-sea form of life that inches like a soft man in a
hard shell finding his prayers along the bottom. Over time it builds
a spiral shell, but always lives in the newest chamber...The other
chambers, they say, contain gas or liquid that helps the nautilus
control its buoyancy...a mute lesson in how to use the past: live in
the most recent chamber and use the others to stay afloat.”
Mark Nepo
(The Book of Awakening, p.305)
In Requiem for a Nun,
William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even
past.” We carry it with us, just as the nautilus carries the
past in its shell. We carry within us the people we've loved, those
who loved us, too, those who broke our hearts, those who helped shape
our minds, our psyches. We carry the scars of past traumas and the
memories of past joys and successes—they color our responses and
determine our perceptions. Our past formed us as individuals and
sustains us everyday.
Just as the nautilus
lives only in the most recently made chamber of its shell, we live in
this present moment. All that we learned, or refused to learn, from
our past exists here, too. We have the option of continuing the
trauma or basking in our glory days, as the case may be, but we also
have the choice of simply using them for buoyancy. The soft body of
the nautilus grows, and as it grows the chambers in its shell
increase in size. We, too, grow in understanding, in complexity, in
sophistication, and, hopefully, in wisdom. It is the experiences of
our past, both good and painful, that produce that growth. Wisdom
does come with age, but only if we're willing to move out of the
confining compartment of our past, and into the spaciousness of now.
The past always informs
the present and the future, but should not limit it. The nautilus
moves forward, never backward, and we can too. The best way I know of
to move into the freedom of a new container is to forgive the past
for it's mistakes and misfortunes, and give thanks for all the
“teachers” who've shaped your present. Then find your prayers
along the bottom and move on.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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