Author: itoccurstocp

Unwrapping the Bundle

In The Creative Encounter Howard Thurman tells the story of meeting a woman on a train who told him: “’Before I left home today I took all my troubles”  — here she digressed for twenty minutes to fill in the details – “made them into a neat bundle and handed them over to God, but before he could get the bundle unwrapped to take a look, I snatched them back again.’”

Thurman’s moral of the story: “There are many people who would feel cheated if suddenly they were deprived of the ego definition that their suffering gives them.”

That resonates with me.  I enjoy a good wallow at least as much as the next person, perhaps more.  To Thurman’s point, though, giving my troubles to God is of little use unless I allow Him time to “get the bundle unwrapped to take a look.”  But of course I want resolution to be not only instantaneous but also to my liking.   

Oh no!  Here comes the one/two punch of humility and patience?

Hearing is the last to go

I read an article recently about a 2020 study in which scientists concluded that hearing is the last human faculty to go. They found that as we approach death, even into unconsciousness, and well after all other human faculties have been lost, our brains still register sounds and spoken words.  That seems like poetic justice to me since I spend so much of my conscious life not listening.  Thankfully, I still have some conscious time left (though one never knows how much) to even the scales a bit.

Auspicious

Reading today from haiku mind by Patricia Donegan:

“When we are present our senses are more attuned to the environment and the environment to us….  The environment is always presenting us with a new circumstance to learn from, be it a book, a shell, a lover, or a friend.  The more we realize how everything is interrelated, and the more our minds are open, then the more auspicious our lives become.”

I didn’t trust my sense as to the meaning of “auspicious” and so I looked it up in Webster’s: “showing or suggesting that future success is likely.”

What jumped out at me here is the “…and the environment to us…” part.  The admonition to be attuned to the environment, to be “present,” is old hat, but the thought of reciprocity, the thought that the environment can in turn be attuned to me, is, to me, new.  I’ll have to ponder that a while, but it does make sense that the more I pay attention to the interrelatedness of events and lives, the more I open my mind “the more auspicious my life becomes.” And that’s a good thing. Just look at the definition.