Tonight I am thinking of how preciously fragile
and how fragilely precious life is
and how we
(even those of us who know this from experience)
walk down the street on a spring day
with buds and birds and bright green leaves
against a blue sky
like it is not a miracle
that our feet stick to the earth
and our lungs draw air in
and we are all spinning in space
and that we get to be here, in this moment,
laughing,
or walking the dog,
or holding a child’s hand,
or eating an ice cream cone.
The house is still and quiet. The only sounds are the low gurgle of the fish tank filter and my fingers tapping on the computer keys. The soft light of morning is just creeping over the pine trees out my back window and the streets are blanketed in just enough darkness that the cars outside my front window drive with their lights on.
In a few minutes, the house will be a flurry of activity. The boys will stumble down the stairs with messy hair and hungry stomachs. The dogs will need to go out. Cereal will be poured. Showers will be turned on. Coffee will be brewed, the dishwasher unloaded.
But for now, for a few more moments, the house is still and quiet.
As a child, I could never understand why my mom didn’t like the television and the radio on when we were at home. “Too much noise,” she would tell me.
Too much noise?, I pondered incredulously. How is that possible?
But now, now I get it.
There is just too much noise.
Noise on the television, noise in our workplaces, noise outside our car windows. Noise in the media and magazines, noise on Facebook and Instagram. Noise coming from internal pressures to do more and be more. Noise telling us to do this or be that. Noise complaining about this issue or that problem. Too much noise filling up space in our heads and blocking out sounds in our hearts.
Too.Much.Noise.
Lately I find myself craving less noise, and more sounds. More laughter and listening to the voices that really count. More music. More meditation, prayer and reflection, more awareness and gratitude, more stillness and quiet.
Clumsy feet are thundering down the stairs now; the morning frenzy is about to begin. Maybe you are already in the midst of your own frenzy.
We can never completely block out the noise, of course, nor do I think that we should. But maybe we could all use a little less noise? And a little more sound?
So here’s my wish for the day: May we have the wisdom to recognize the difference between the noise and the sounds. May we learn to hear our own strong and true voice inside, and may we have the courage to listen to it. And may we all have a few moments of stillness and quiet.
How do you quiet the noise?
*****
Note: This post originally appeared on the author’s website.
Buddhist wisdom says there are three ways we naturally approach anything—desire, aversion, or indifference. For the sake of convenience, I call them, “yum!” “eeeeewwww” and “zzzzzz.”
I see a slice of cheese cake. “Yum!” I love cheese cake. So, I desire the slice of cheese cake. I grab it. Five hundred calories down my gullet. I see a squirrel that’s been hit by a car. Eeeeeewwww! Aversion. I look away. Then there’s indifference: trees along the route to work, for example. Those tchotchkes around the house that you haven’t dusted in months. Indifference. You just don’t see them. “Zzzzzz.”
I swallow the cheese cake before I even have time to enjoy it. I’m too caught up in my aversion at the sight of the wounded squirrel to help. I don’t bother looking up to see the gift that simple things like sycamore trees or a souvenir from long ago can bring.
Desire. Aversion. Indifference. These are the reactions we naturally have when our brains are on autopilot. And Buddhists say these lead to our suffering. We go through our thoughtless lives wanting, rejecting, and ignoring. And it’s always about me, me, and me.
How can we get out of that cycle?
Buddhism teaches that we have to find a place of equanimity—calmness; composure; evenness of temper.
But how can I keep evenness of temper when there’s cheese cake around? How can I stay composed when I experience disgusting or frightening things? How can I be composed when I’m staring absently out the window and don’t even see what’s in front of my nose?
Equanimity is about being mindful—aware—no matter how tempting, disgusting, or boring something is. Equanimity is about living in the here and now fully. Fully in touch with what surrounds us, without saying “yum!” “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”
Equanimity is clearly a way of bringing our aspirations into our actions, of bringing what we wish we did and what we do into closer relationship.
Easier said than done! But that’s how it is with religious thinking: it is always about either paddling upstream—against the currents of human nature—or it’s about how human nature is OK after all, at least in certain circumstances.Things like war, murder, torture, xenophobia, oppression. That sort of thing.
Sigmund Freud, no fan of religion, argued that culture does much the same thing as religion. It functions to mitigate the fearsomeness of nature; to reconcile us to the randomness and cruelty of fate; and to explain why culture itself makes so many problems for us.
It seems to me that both culture and religion (perhaps because the separation of church and state is a modern invention) are pretty good at creating duty, because both contain carrots and sticks. They create duty but not necessarily (or commonly) responsibility, which is a personal choice unaffected by carrots or sticks. Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it this way: “civilization rests upon what it exacts from its people, not from what it furnishes them.” The same can be said of most of religion.
Responsibility is a personal choice. A choice arrived at (or not) by each of us. How we get there depends upon the lives and circumstances we experience. Responsibility is a personal ideal. We live up to it.
Which brings me back to equanimity. It, too, is an ideal—we’re always going to default to “yum!” or “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”
Equanimity. The Buddhists think it’s a good way to act. It’s what made the Stoics stoic.
Equanimity. It’s a choice.
Podcast: Download (2.1MB)
Subscribe: More
A one-paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the morning rush hour at Grand Central Terminal. A train pulls in; a well-dressed woman gets off. Before the doors close, the woman realizes that she is holding only one of her leather gloves. She looks back into the train and spots the matching one on a seat. It is obviously too late to dash back in to retrieve it, so with a cavalier shrug, she flings her arm out and, the doors about to close, tosses her one glove onto the seat alongside its mate. The doors shut, and the train pulls away. Read more →
Podcast: Download (13.0MB)
Subscribe: More
Oh, letting go. Every so often a minister has to preach on something that is absolutely not a personal strength. And this is one of those times. I’m not a letter-go; I’m an attacher and a holder-on. I hold onto people and relationships I love. I hold onto to souvenirs and mementos. I hang onto old things from my parents or grandparents, even when I have no place to put them. I hold onto and reread beloved books—some I have read 10, maybe 20 times. I have transplanted plants from one house’s garden to another, clung like a vine to bad boyfriends and outworn securities, cherished broken knickknacks and topless treasure boxes and coverless books—sometimes even books with pages that keep falling out.
Podcast: Download (7.1MB)
Subscribe: More
We don’t get a say in the roots we inherit, even as they stretch beneath the surface of our daily lives and contain within them countless stories—of danger and survival and elation and heartbreak—that inform our living in ways we understand and ways we do not. No matter if we spend a lifetime tracing what we can learn about our family’s branches of these roots, or if we do all we can to ignore or even abandon these roots, they will remain there all the same, connecting us to the past, and in a sense, to each other.
Podcast: Download (7.3MB)
Subscribe: More
My uncle had lost his powers of speech by the time he died. In his hospital bed, surrounded by his loved ones, he used a bead board to spell out what he wanted to say during his final days. At one point, my cousin told me, everyone leaned in close because it seemed like he wanted to say something important. C-H-A-N-G-E—the whole family sounded out the word—change!—and wondered what important words might follow. T-H-E O-I-L F-I-L-T-E-R eventually came through. He was reminding my aunt to do a job he had always done on their furnace. For some reason, letting go of this detail was critical for him as he departed the planet. These were some of his final words.
Podcast: Download (5.1MB)
Subscribe: More
Have you ever had an all-out, meltdown, full-on temper tantrum? I don’t remember having major hissy fits when I was little, although if you asked my mom you would probably learn that’s more about my faulty memory than my good temper. I certainly have been witness to some raging temper tantrums as a parent. My daughter’s frequent tantrums in her younger years pretty much always grew out of wanting something that she couldn’t have—either because we weren’t willing to satisfy her desire, or simply because couldn’t find the thing that she wanted. Either way, you could watch her brain dashing around and around in a tiny little circle: “I want it! I don’t have it! I want it! I don’t have it! I want it! I don’t have it!”
Podcast: Download (1.1MB)
Subscribe: More
It was the weekend before I was scheduled for a biopsy. Marta spent the morning gathering stones on the beach. Later that evening, she pressed a smooth round stone into my hand and said “I know that when you’re facing a challenge it helps to have something to hold onto. I chose this stone especially for you so you will have something to hold onto this week.” On the plane going home somehow I lost the stone, but during my biopsy I held on to Marta’s love.
May 2014
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” —Havelock Ellis
Can you give $5 or more to sustain the ministries of the Church of the Larger Fellowship?
If preferred, you can text amount to give to 84-321
Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.