Hey there.
Settle in.
Settle down.
Let your inhale be deep and slow.
When you exhale,
Let it all go.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
One of the main tenets of Buddhism is beginner's mind,
Or approaching everything with an I don't know mindset.
This is meant to create a freedom,
A freedom from views,
A freedom from expectations.
It's been called the wisdom of uncertainty.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Anybody mind if I slip the Buddha some gravel in his rice for that one?
Seriously.
I mean,
Freedom sounds kind of nice,
But the wisdom of uncertainty?
Isn't it safer to say the overwhelming and terrifying vexation of uncertainty?
Inhale.
Exhale.
All of us have probably been awash in the tidal pull of not knowing.
Here we are simply trying to keep ourselves from drowning in don't know.
And it seems pretty damn Pollyannish to imagine that slapping a smile on our faces and getting curious is going to make it all okay.
As I was thinking about this,
Two images came to mind.
The first is of quicksand.
When we don't know,
It feels as if the grounding of our lives has gone soft,
Unstable.
And if anybody else out there was raised on Gilligan's Island,
You know,
The more you struggle in quicksand,
The deeper you drop.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The second image is that familiar story of the elephant surrounded by different people who are blind.
One person says this animal is long like a snake.
The other says it's solid like a column holding up a building.
The third says it's like a huge palm leaf fluttering gently in the breeze.
Breathe in.
Release and let go.
When we are surrounded by a sea of uncertainty,
We can thrash and fight,
Ending up exhausting our resources,
Sinking deeper and deeper into the frightening depths.
When we are pushed into a wilderness of don't know,
We can focus on the perspective that this is bad,
Terrifying.
We can get charged by a thundering herd of if onlys.
If only I knew what to do.
If only I knew what was going to happen next.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Can I just say that either of those responses is completely natural?
We are hard wired for both of them.
Our brains focus on what is wrong because that's how we survive.
But survive is different than thrive.
Thriving rarely leads to thriving.
And if we're always focused only on what's wrong,
It's like looking at life through a pinhole,
Focusing only on the fear and uncertainty blocks out the big picture.
What is the big picture?
We are alive.
Yes,
The world is hard and hurting.
Yes,
Our lives are uncertain.
Yes,
Troubling events will happen and we will be asked to live with uncertainty.
But we are alive.
That's one of the things I learned with my breast cancer.
This is it.
This is our chance to live as fully and widely as we can,
Present with whatever arises.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The Buddha was right.
Of course he was.
In a life imbued with transience,
Beginner's mind can sound like the easy way out.
It is anything but.
It is not a saccharine denial of the travails of life.
It is a conscious choice of centering in our center.
There we can stop thrashing and start sitting,
Grounded in our body and breath.
We can look at all the details,
The many different perspectives offered to us in the big picture.
Imagine the stories we'll get to tell when we live and see,
Widely and deeply,
A new,
A fresh,
Live light.
