Our great universe is flooded with a galaxy of wonders. It beckons us incessantly to savour its rich beauty and explore its endless charm. Surely, life around is so amazing, we ought to hold fast. It is wondrous, full of beauty and splendour and laden with such amazing charm that it permeates the radiance through every pore of God’s own earth. We are always amazed by this great mystery but often fail to appreciate it in the heat and bustle of our daily life. All too often we recognise it in hindsight or in our backward glance, when we remember what a spectacle it held for us and then suddenly realise that it is no more.
We remember a beauty that faded, a love that waned, a music that receded, a life that ebbed and a wonder that mellowed. But we remember with far greater pain that we did not see that beauty when it bloomed and blossomed .There is a deep wrench that we failed to respond to love with love when it was offered, that we failed to enjoy the music when it resonated and didn’t appreciate the beauty when it glowed.
Life’s gifts are precious and abundant — but we are too heedless of them. In the bustle of our everyday hopelessness, there is always a lovely world beckoning us to cheer us along the way. Thomas Merton describes the rush and pressure of modern life as a form of contemporary violence. He says, “… to be surrendering to too many demands, too many concerns, is to succumb to the violence.”
When we’re speeding along, we violate our own natural rhythms in a way that prevents us from listening to our inner life and being in a resonant field with others. We get tight. We get small. We override our capacity to appreciate beauty, to celebrate, to savour from the heart. When we stop charging forward and open to what’s here, there’s a radical shift in our experience of being alive. As we touch into this space of “hereness”, we access wisdom, love and creativity that are otherwise not available to us when we’re on our way to another place. We are home, in our aliveness and our spirit.
We should never be too busy to deprive ourselves of the wonder and the awe of life and should be reverent of each drawing day. We must embrace each wonderful hour, seize each golden minute. Even ordinary things have the power to touch every heart. Simple things like a man ploughing his field, a woman pulling water from a well, a village girl with a bundle of firewood stacked on her head, the grandma feeding a baby cow, a fisherman heading out to the sea — all are images which tell us that everything is all right with the world today.
At twilight, the stars twinkle across the nightly mantle, radiant and luminous. We can use these silent moments to soften our pain and salve our grieving heart. It is in such gentler moments that we can seek the melody of our lives and perceive the astral beauty of the divine. This is the great lesson of life: Hold on fast to life, but not so fast that you cannot let go. We must accept our losses and learn how to let go.
