Yesterday...

Yesterday, how much time and energy do we spend wishing things were how they were? Wishing that we could go back, pause time, make it last that little bit longer. But life isn't static, is it?

“It ebbs and it flows and people grow up and move away and graduate and lose their jobs and people that you love die and some people get married and others don't and some get divorced and some get cancer and things aren't how they were... If you need to celebrate how good it was then celebrate, if you need to remember how great it was when they were alive, then remember that. And if you need to grieve, grieve. If you need to apologize or make amends or you need to do something to make peace with how it was then do it, but then move on.”

Take the memories and look forward because honestly there is a certain kind of desperate, despair that sets in when you believe that things were better back then. Because when you’re stuck back there you can never be fully present here, now, today.

We don't have a guarantee about tomorrow and we can’t ever go back, all we have is today. Some of us live in the fantasy that we’ll get around to it tomorrow, that we’ll get around to them tomorrow. The danger is that we will wake up, and it will not be tomorrow, it will be yesterday and we will have missed it, you will have missed them... we will have missed life. Today.

* This was written after watching Nooma, Today by Rob Bell.

Stories...

Be it of privilege, of poverty, of justice prevailing or not; every being has a story. The first time I saw the above picture I was haunted by it's poignancy, but unable to write about it. Too often it's tempting to travel though life with our eyes firmly closed to the stories people around us may have to tell. We often don't want to be witness to the intricacies of their lives; we don't want clarity or intimate knowledge of where and whom they went home to at night, their joy and their sorrow, their love or their heartache. Because once you know it their lives can become a part of our story.

It's tempting to hide at home reading Alice Pung because she's safe. Her stories of poverty, struggle and oppression, are beautifully written and bound together in book's with a guaranteed happy ending. Stories of triumph, leaving you with the comforting impression that there is a sense of justice to this world. 

But as Milan Kundera once wrote that “... there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

On opening my eyes I find that my difficulty is not compassion; the telling of or becoming involved in a story, that is the easy part. My difficulty is walking away; choosing whose story to tell and whose battle to fight. I struggle keeping quiet, letting go and acknowledging that the world is at times is cruel and unfair and as much as I wish I could find a way to fix everything and everyone's pain, communicate every untold story to the world... I can't.

There will always be countless stories, retold and forgotten in equal measure; I am coming to believe that while I can't fix the world's problems or pay tribute to every story, I can go through life dedicated to keeping my eye's open to the stories of those around me. I can pray for the wisdom to know what stories I am called to tell, what battles I am called to fight and when I'm called to simply let go.

“The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set.”

— Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama

Empty my hands...

Career... How much the thought fills my head with a fruit salad of emotion. All through university I couldn’t wait to get out and into the “real world”, start a successful career, make money and prove to everyone who said I couldn’t, that I can. Now, after taking almost two years off I’m here at the beginning trying to find the right place to start, searching for direction and a dream, feeling lost and oh so vulnerable. What if no one hires me? What if I make a wrong choice? What then?

For so long I’ve wanted to be successful in order to prove my worth and while I’ll openly admit that I still want to be successful, my definition of success is changing. Success is not so much about the amount of money I earn or working for the prestigious companies anymore. Success for me is becoming more and more about personal happiness and my ability to contribute positively to the lives of others. I’m coming to the realization that I would rather have an average job I love, a job where I feel valued and supported than killing myself doing something I don’t like, to prove myself to people who don’t care about me.

  “Well, it all comes to this; there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is to   live in your own. After all, I believe in myself. I'm not so bad and silly as they think me..." L.M. Montgomery

“I let these dreams die, If I lay down all my wounded pride, If I let these dreams die, Will I find that letting go lets me come alive...”  Empty my hands, Tenth Avenue North

Kindred spirits...

I’ve always been looking to find kindred spirits to share my life with ever since reading Anne of Green Gables as a 14 year old. But I have to admit that eventhough I'm always looking to find kindred spirits I have this nagging fear of what if. What if my kindred spirits... don't like me? What if, because of my flaws - my shyness, self-consciousness, uninteresting-ness - a potentially wonderful friendship falls flat on the floor?

Sometimes that fear can be personified in me trying-too-hard. Unfortunately my trying often presents a wall; a certain coldness, a front that stalls a real, foundation upon which to build a genuine, heartfelt, rewarding friendship.

I recently read a quote by photographer Cecil Beaton, recalling his first meeting with Audrey Hepburn 1954:

“...without any of the preliminaries I felt that she cut through to a basic understanding that makes people friends. Nothing had to be explained: we liked one another. A chord had been stuck and I knew that, next time we met, we would continue straight from here with no recapitulation of formalities. This was a unique occasion.”

Cecil reminded me that a blossoming friendship is not dependent upon making oneself seem attractive to others. It is about being warm and accepting, and welcoming those who cross our paths with open arms. Shedding layers, rather than donning them. Because it's the not trying - the effortlessness - that really makes some friendship's unique.

"Your heart and my heart

are very, very old friends."

— Hafiz