Messages when/where you need them....

or... "Where will you be in five years?" - part two.

Still working out the question. Or... it's really the wrong question. The more appropriate, life-affirming, enlightening, accurate question is:

WHO will I be in five years?

I've got at least a shot a the answer to that one. And quite frankly, isn't that the more important angle? I have little control over there wheres and whys of my future - we all make decisions on where we hope to be, even plan to be, but how often are we there in the ways we planned on? And if we do end up exactly where we want to, is that destination based on limited knowledge? I certainly hope five years from now, I'll want more than I have now. Not more stuff, more achievements, more accolades, more projects - just a general need for a more developed sense of self, based on what I do every day.

This was a STUNNING realization for me. I'm sure it was banging around my brain for awhile, but it all became clear in a sudden moment in meeting on Wednesday. Some Friends in Cambridge, speaking to their hopes and fears of how they will ever get through all they see as necessary and asked of them. Living day-to-day through the burdens of the world. True dilemmas and crises, serious issues - how do we cope with them all?

By only attending to what is directly asked of us. I was reminded this week of the words of Thomas R Kelly (written during the build-up to World War II):

Kelly wrote of the “particularization of my responsibility in a world too vast and a lifetime too short for me to carry all responsibilities .... Toward them all we feel kindly, but we are dismissed from active service in most of them .... We cannot die on every cross, nor are we expected to .... The concern oriented life is ordered and organized from within. And we learn to say No as well as Yes by attending to the guidance of inner responsibility.”

Life for me is about choosing "stuff" right now - time with family and help with schooling for Maille, a graduate school path, daily interests and purchases and long-term commitments that are financial and physical. Health issues that are serious and demand my attention. Issues that help me to see the pain of others, and empathize in a way which I am grateful for.

What was I most grateful for this week? A gentle reminder that I have at least, in the last year, discovered a bit more of the emotional space I need, the spiritual guidance that I long to tap into, which surprises me at its effortless appearance when I need it the most. Often, in the expectant waiting of a Quaker meeting. This week, in a meeting of Friends, but not friends. The anonymity made no difference. Their message for me was abundantly clear. Keep calm and steadfast in the struggle to balance those problems of the whole world with the ones that I can address directly. Keep questioning - but not with the heavy heart of great burden, but rather with a lightened curiosity and faith that answers will come when I am ready to hear them.

"...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rilke