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Columnist Writes About Slowing Down
Hey everyone! Hope you all are doing well.
Check out this column from Brad, which came out earlier this year. Oddly enough, Brad wrote this right before the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to stay home and slow down. How’s that for irony?
That said, this is an extremely poignant column. Like Brad, I’ve been a lot healthier in recent years, and I can relate to the notion of “making up for lost time.” Sometimes, slowing down is the hardest thing to do.
This passage sticks out to me: “For three years, I lived fast, uncertain of how many days I’d have left. Today, 37 months after my lung transplant, I think I’ve made up for 23 years of missed experiences. (Then again, maybe that never should have been the goal.) I think I can slow down and appreciate what’s been and is being accomplished rather than blur past it all.”
Do you have any takeaways from this column? Can you relate to the notion of trying to make up for time when you were sick and hospitalized?
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You are the fullness of life!
It is good to hear that Brad has found out the beauty of slowing down. Most people, irrespective of their health condition, are victim to the conditioning of this (western – but it has spread almost all over the planet unfortunately) society. The conditioning that urges us to be active, to Do, instead of to Be and to find the beauty of stillness.Sometimes it requires a personal disease (or a global virus) to slow us down against our will – or to be more precise, the will of our ego-mind, often falsely posing as our soul. In other cases it requires a depression, anxiety disorder or a burn-out or some other crisis. Sometimes it is just experience and the wisdom that comes with age. In any case, after slowing down there is a chance to find the real life beyond the madness that we had fallen victim to. The sooner you find this truth, the better.
This madness, commonly known as “the pursuit of happiness” and as such in some countries even to be found as constitutional right, is kind of a worldwide psychosis to which homo sapiens has fallen victim. It makes us feel that we and the world are separated and that we need to restore the connection by acquiring as many relations, possessions, knowledge, money, power, experiences etc. as possible. We think only than we will have “the fullness of life”. The problem of this is, that the ego-mind is never satisfied and there are endless “things” to acquire in the outside world, none of which are stable and fulfilling. Eventually we will get tired and disappointed when we live our lives this way.
Because almost all of us have fallen victim to this psychosis, it can present itself in our world as “being normal” and has done so for ages, with everyone unhappily playing the same weird game. It is only after finding out the truth, that we can expose this “normal state” as dysfunctional and unreal, and find real happiness (joy) in the stillness of being. That is the real fullness of life. In this state, we can still enjoy everything in the world, but what we find there we don’t mistake for our innate happiness anymore. And we know it is given to us for free, it is much bigger and richer than anything we could ever acquire out there and all our doing is only interfering with it.We then know (beyond the mind) that we need not Do anything to become happy – we Are happiness itself; it is our nature. What we have been looking for so hard in the outside world, was always with us in the first place, that’s why we couldn’t find it. This discovery is a sort of awakening from a dream, and life after that is much lighter, easier, it flows natural and is ever complete. Beyond good and bad, dark and light, beyond all the profane bipolarities the mind loved to grasp and could never balance, there is an innate equilibrium in “that what is”. And you find out that you are not separate from that. You are that and you just have to rest in that and trust it. From that, any activity can flow, but you will never leave that foundation.
I hope Brad does not spend too long thinking about the past 3 years. Everything that ever happened brought him here now. He should focus on that. It is the only thing that is real. Life is always right here now, to enjoy as it is. Just observe, chop the wood and carry the water. And keep admiring those trees!Namaste,
Paul
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