I have spent so much of my life trying to change things. Trying to move toward a better version of myself, a better situation, a better outcome. I thought that was the point. To improve. To fix. To arrive somewhere better than where I started.
But today I saw something a tad more clearly than before. Any attempt to change is a step away from where one is aiming to be. All I can really do is accept this moment as it is, regardless of what it brings, and know that it too will pass. This is because, by wanting something different all we’re doing is exchanging one idea of who we thing we are for another. But that aspect of ourselves that is real, is always present and unchanging.
This realisation tempers expectations. If a good moment eventually passes, then a difficult moment eventually passes too. The more I reflect on this, the more I arrive at an unavoidable conclusion, that the wisest response is simply to accept and savour the moment without trying to hold on to it or push it away.
But here is the harder part. I see patterns – thoughts and feelings arise that have their origin in past events, most of which are not obvious to me. They surface like wispy phantoms at twilight on a foggy night. They come from somewhere I cannot trace. Again, acceptance seems the only honest conclusion.
And this leads me somewhere deeper. There is no original thought. No feeling. No sensation that is not linked to a causal chain stretching back through time. If I am meant to feel something, experience something, perceive something, it will be. There is no way to will anything new into existence without context.
But here is the correction I must accept – This causal chain is only true from the relative view. From the absolute view, there is no chain and no time. Thoughts and feelings simply arise spontaneously in awareness. The freedom is not in accepting the chain. The freedom is in seeing that the chain was never real.
This brings me to the nature of suffering. We suffer because we want things to be different to what they are. Happiness does not come from being able to change one condition for a more preferable one. It comes from realising that one was never responsible for that duty in the first place. The burden of fixing everything was never mine to carry. I suppose that this realisation must feel like the relief one feels awakening from a nightmare and realising that all is well – it was all just a bad dream.
And yet the heart still aches.
You want to be able to modify your situation. You want to ease the struggles of the ones you love. You want to reach out and rearrange the world into something softer, something kinder.
And then the question arises. Is there any benevolence in any of this? Or is the universe just a cold, unfeeling, indifferent chain of cause and effect?
I do not have an answer today. But I know this much. The universe is not cold or indifferent because the universe is not separate from awareness. Awareness is what allows the heartache to be felt. It is not a machine. It is the space in which everything appears, including the ache and including the love that wants to ease the ache of others. And without existence – who would know what love is?
Maybe that is enough for today.