Buddhist philosophy reminds us that everything is impermanent. Everything — the good, the bad, and the ordinary. I’ve come to accept this truism over my years.
Sometimes we use impermanence as a club. We think that if everything is impermanent, we shouldn’t invest in anything. I think it’s the opposite. Because things are impermanent, we invest. We step into them. We engage completely with our lives. We can find this hard to embrace throughout our life. This mainly stems from fear but guess what?
Fear is our teacher
Our fear is rich in information content. If we lean into it, not only do we realize that it isn’t as scary as we think, but it also opens us up to possibility, creativity, and resilience. By choosing to “manage the conditions” of fear (versus diagnosing the root cause) we become stuck in a life of reactivity
So let’s get to know it, so we can encourage that gap in the center of it — where we can move from reactivity to responsiveness. There’s a stimulus that’s arising now, what do we do? If we follow our knee-jerk reaction, we’re just going to play out the habit we played before. And big surprise, that’s probably not going to make much of a difference.
So we can remember two questions that matter. . .
Am I loved? and Did I love? And here’s the shortcut on the Buddhist principle about “being present.” We can live the answers to those two questions starting today.
Peace and Love, Jim
