on the road to finding the meaning of life.
I want to share this, that I came across in my meditation this morning.
In his beautiful meditation on the art of living, Henry Miller asserts:
'We spend our lives fleeing from the present moment, constantly occupying ourselves with over-planning the future or recoiling with anxiety over its impermanence, thus invariably robbing ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness.'
Concentrate on the words which sum up how we spend our lives:
Fleeing from the present moment - because it is unhappy/sad/distressing...
Constantly occupying ourselves with planning (even over-planning) for the future - in other words - hoping...
Recoiling with anxiety over the impermanence of the future - 'oh no, this happiness is not going to last' or 'oh no, this peace is transient'....
And so, we are terribly busy - running, planning-hoping, anxious...
Søren Kierkegaard says that 'busy is a decision.' And we are making this decision constantly. We are deciding to be busy running, planning-hoping, anxious.
Result - unhappiness. A neither here nor there kind of unsettling feeling.
Now examine this. Honestly, face it. We see that the root cause for all this running and planning-hoping and anxiety is outside of ourselves. It is not something that we see right away - it takes a lot of digging, and honest assessment, and hard facing-up to, to see that all this that we are so busy about actually lies outside of us. Any wonder, then, that we make ourselves unhappy?
And Kierkegaard corroborates that. He says, 'the unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself.'
So, since decision making is one of the things we can do, we can actually decide not to be busy running, or remembering, or planning-hoping or being anxious.
Just do what presents itself in that moment. React only to the moment. Be present to ourselves.
And thus, not rob ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness.