What Happens with What Happens to Us

Lately I’ve been thinking that it doesn’t much matter what happens to us over the course of our lives. What matters is what we do with happens to us.

Despite our best efforts to make it not be so, anything can happen. And anything usually does.

Maybe we’ll get the job we imagine we richly deserve, the work we know to be so right we can feel it in our backbones and in the afternoon rustle of the trees in our backyard.

And maybe we won’t.

Maybe we’ll live to be 102, and tell a fabulous, detailed, dirty joke on the eve of our dying day.

And maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll die young, for reasons that can’t be explained. Maybe we’ll win the lottery. Maybe we’ll score a Pulitzer Prize. Maybe we'll find ourselves on the cover of People Magazine. Maybe something tragic and untimely will happen to a child of ours.

And maybe it won’t.

Maybe all of this will happen. And maybe none of it will.

Knowing this, what interests me these days is a single question: how can I respond gracefully, moment to moment, to whatever it is that comes my way?

Other questions trail just slightly behind. How can I give myself over to the big "yes" of life, while understanding full well that I may never understand? That life might forever remain an awe-inspiring mystery? Can I move from the space of "yes" for the sheer lunacy of it?

And might heartbreak be viewed in another way entirely? As perhaps an opportunity to not only not cease up, but to do the opposite--to relax and become better acquainted with compassion, so that our hearts might be opened wider still?

Can I dare myself to do the unthinkable, to love at all costs?

My practice, always. And always so much to work with.