“A gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history Monday, cutting down his victims in two attacks two hours apart. The bloodbath ended with the gunman committing suicide, bringing the death toll to 33 and stamping the campus in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains with unspeakable tragedy, perhaps forever.”
One of the recurring dilemmas we face is when to act and when not to.
Writer/speaker Louise Hay has illustrated this using the analogy of going to a restaurant. Once you place your order, you wait. You don’t follow the waiter into the kitchen to make sure the food is prepared and served. You trust that it will arrive when it’s ready. But given other circumstances, we panic when we don’t see results immediately, and we feel we need to do something to make something happen.
We’ve been taught that the way to accomplish things is to take action. And sometimes, when we do take the right action, and it doesn’t yield the expected results, we start feeling out of control. Given half a chance, we’d like to control the sun, the tides and the seasons. But life has natural rhythms and cycles: and we just don’t resist those cycles. They will go on whatever we do.
Look closely, and you’ll find rhythms and cycles in your life. There are times when the smallest action brings results and other times when you turn the world topsy turvy and nothing happens. There’s no logical explanation for either.
Blessing or curse, we have a questioning mind. But is it possible to live with unresolved questions? Trying to force an answer, uncertainty sets in and that could be even more painful than living with questions.
In his book, “Power versus Force,” Dr. David Hawkins says, “We think we live by forces we can control, but in fact we are governed by power from unrevealed sources, power over which we have no control.”
If we can learn to live in harmony with these forces instead of fighting them, riding the wave when it’s going in our direction and surrendering when it’s not, we can make the most of our efforts and reduce our level of frustration.
Ultimately, knowing when to act and when not to is a personal judgement call. A key idea is to tune into your own rhythms and develop strategies for dealing with the low times as well as the high energy levels.
The Big Picture
To everything there is a reason, a plan. Can you expect a single celled micro organism to understand the CPU on your computer? When I try to flow with that idea, the drain on my intellect suddenly seems much less. The moment I’m living in unfolds more elegantly with less struggle. I don’t see the big picture, because I just can’t.
Sometimes when I feel sad or depressed, I try to tell myself sadness is just as much a part of life as happiness. Just as all the seasons are part of nature, all my feelings are part of me. Would I awaken on a rainy day and refuse to let it rain? Would I claim that I’m going to do everything I can to stop the rain? No. When it rains, it rains.
I accept the fact that there are times when I feel sad — and irrevocably lost.
Yet, can I try to let it be a part of being human, and the circumstances that led to it a part of an unknown design?
Entries (RSS)