Month: February 2023

As humans, we suffer. All too often we are in the pain, guilt, regret of the past or the worry, fear, imagined catastrophe of the future. In the middle is the now, wheee we have control, where the past is gone and the future isn’t here yet. But how?

To be in the now, radically accept reality as it is. “The Power of Now” is a masterful book on the Now -which should be studied by all. Breathing and focusing on what our breath, brings us to the now. What also brings us to the now is to imagine that you are recording1 all that you see. Imagine everything you see is you recording. What you think, see., feel, this is the live footage being recorded that will be used and relied on later.

The time is now, be in now, now? Action!!!

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Why do bad things happen? Why can’t we control things enough to stop the bad things? The pain, regret, guilt, self-condemnation of past mistakes, why didn’t we do better? Why did the bad things happen? I heard a line once, which was “everyone is doing the best they can, with the information they had at the time.” True. But the inexplainable bad things that happen to us, not what we decide, what about them? Well the fact is, it’s out of our control. We don’t control the bad things that happen to us, we can only control how we respond.

Misery is unavoidable, bad things will happen, it is not in our control. Thank God bad things do happen or we wouldn’t be able to feel what good things feel like. What is sunshine without the rain? Miserable things happening to us are not in our control, but staying miserable is. A man lost his child and refused to stay miserable. “I refuse to have her death, the reason be something bad, it must be for something good.” Misery sucks. If it’s not good, then it’s good cause to cause good.

Good cause is a legal term denoting adequate or substantial grounds or reason to take a certain action, or to fail to take an action prescribed by law. So, misery is good cause to cause good in the world. Help another, be kind, smile, laugh, do some good. The worse things get, the more “good cause” you have to cause good. The world is cold, go be warm to someone.

So often we are trapped in either the regret/ guilt/suffering of the past or the fear/worry/suffering of the future. How we expected things to be in the past and how we failed or how we expect things to be in the future and what we fear expecting to happen. Bouncing between the past and future like bouncing between hot sides in an oven. Suffering; expectations resisting reality.

Buddhists say that failing to get what we desire, our attachment to things, is suffering. Stoic/Marcus Aurelius said “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it” meaning suffering doesn’t happen to us, our own judgment and self create suffering. We should not hope for things to go as we desire, the past or the future expectations, but for the past and future to go exactly as they did and exactly how they will.

This is not to say we shouldn’t dream and strive for the best, on the contrary, this is to do our best in the things we can control and not suffer in the things we can’t