UNDERSTAND

WORDS LIKE LIGHT

Friday, August 5, 2022

I have spent a significant part of my life trying to understand things, and I’ve usually thought of it as hard work, but as the years have passed, it has slowly come to me that ‘understanding’ might be as simple and easy as ‘standing under’ something. Instead of always struggling to analyze life’s endless puzzles, perhaps I need to practice just being silent and present with the puzzles, standing under them and letting their solutions slowly unfold for me. I don’t mean that understanding doesn’t often require work, but maybe the work can be of the peaceful and silent kind. In trying to understand life’s perplexities, perhaps I should see each of them as a sky at dawn, and just silently stand under them to gradually see the sunrise of their meanings. This would not be easy, since it would require some serious patience and persistence, but it would not be a frantic kind of work. There would be a lot of stillness and waiting in the work, but slowly I might see the answers smoothly spreading out above me.