Dear friends,
I woke up this morning not thinking of good ideas about how to spend the gift of this new day.
I had the usual sense of gratitude for being alive again,
But for some reason the next idea entering my head this morning had to do with escalators.
As I lay there half awake,
I thought of how reflecting on these everyday modes of transport within buildings might provide us with some words of encouragement for life.
And so you have this meditation.
Let's begin by coming to a place of stillness,
Leaving aside for these few moments anything which is interfering with our peace of mind.
You know the usual,
The never finished to-do list,
Some nagging concerns about some approaching deadline,
And some of these if-only thoughts concerning the past.
So right now,
Relax.
Come into the present.
Close your eyes if you wish,
And let's be grateful for the fact that we have this time of reflection together.
Maybe a one-minute pause would be a help in bringing us into presence.
And now to this unlikely subject for reflection,
The escalator.
As a child,
I was utterly fascinated when I first saw an escalator,
A moving stairway in a store which was full of possibilities for a young person.
It was a type of Aladdin's cave.
But let's think of how this taken-for-granted means of reaching a floor above or a floor below might be of help to us in everyday life,
And I don't mean just as an aid in shopping.
In life,
We can be faced with a path ahead which splits to offer us two possibilities of moving forward.
The question is,
Do we move to the right or to the left?
In making a choice,
We know that the path will split again and again,
Making it less likely that we will ever find our way back to the same place.
But this can be the subject for reflection on another day.
Today,
The thoughts are about escalators,
And escalators are different.
Here,
We are faced with the opportunity of going up or down,
And having made the choice,
We have the possibility of coming back to our starting point.
This reminds us that we can always recover from a wrong decision,
And I'm sure every one of us would like to begin again after having made a mistake.
This is where the escalator gives us hope.
We travel down full of confidence and passion,
Believing that what we are seeking will be found on a certain level.
In a multi-storey situation,
We might travel down again and again,
And we might only realise our mistake when we reach the basement.
But with escalators,
We can always begin again.
Now this is not to say that we deliberately go out to make mistakes.
Misjudgments are regrettable,
And they can leave us with a sense of failure,
Preventing us from making all the progress that is still possible.
Mistakes can act like a ball and chain around the ankles of our good intentions.
Is there any one of us who can put up our hands and claim that we've never slipped from the path that we know to be right and good?
Sometimes we might find in life that we have reached a dark and dismal basement from which we would like to return.
In our hearts,
We all wish to inhabit a place filled with light and possibility,
And the good news is that yes,
We can.
This very day,
We can look around us and see the escalator which has brought us down.
Alongside this,
We can see an escalator moving in the opposite direction.
All we have to do is turn around and begin again.
Step onto the escalator that's moving up.
Let's have a final pause for reflection now.
This can be an invitation to each of us to begin again.
All of us will have come across the saying,
Today is the first day of the rest of your life,
And we all know that it is.
A 60 second pause now.
Welcome back again.
And finally,
My wish for you.
In the department store of life,
With all its many levels,
May you find a location that fills your life with real,
Enduring happiness.
Life and all of its possibilities comes to us one day at a time.
This is where,
Day by day,
Each of us can make a difference.
May you wake up each morning with a sense of awe and wonder and gratitude for your being.
And may each evening find you relaxing into a contented sleep.
Knowing that,
Today,
You have done your best.
