During the hectic days of my professional career, I periodically heard the popular idiom "stop and smell the roses". In my youth and naïveté I promptly ignored such sound counsel. Why is it we're so focused on the busyness of life rather than the beingness of living?
Consider what's on your mind in any given day. Chances are, your thoughts relate to what certain others are doing (or have done or might yet do) or the incessant bodily demands and its concomitant complaints.
We each have a list of desires we believe would make us happy, as well as a much longer catalog of grievances that clearly darken our days.
Enter Thornton Wilder's contemplative Emily Webb at the end of Act III: "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?"
What a poignant thought! Do we ever realize life while we live it?
Realize life. As in, become aware of awareness itself.
Life is the grand is-ness of being. Not bodily being, but rather boundless presence.
Yet we cling to all our distractions. All our objections. All our strivings. And most definitely not realizing life.
As A Course in Miracles starkly sets forth:
What you have given “life” is not alive, and symbolizes but your wish to be alive apart from life, alive in death, with death perceived as life.
Thankfully there is another way. Despite what Our Town's Stage Manager suggests, transcendence is not limited to the "saints and poets". We need merely realize life. As the course lovingly affirms, "You have spent long days and nights in celebrating death. Today you learn to feel the joy of life."
Join me in Thursday's class where we'll explore this concept of realizing life and the deep peace that naturally ensues. I look forward to seeing you then.