What If: Happily Ever...Now

Monday, October 18, 2010

Happily Ever...Now

All stories that end "happily ever after" should be amended to read "...and they lived happily IN THAT MOMENT." Leave them alone after that! Who knows what comes next? Write your own story, because NOW is the only moment in which you can be happy.

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Ajahn Buddhadasa calls these interludes of natural or purposeful pausing "temporary nirvana." We touch the freedom that is possible in any moment when we are not grasping after our experience or resisting it. He writes that without such moments of pausing, " . . . living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us.

-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

. . . that player, when I saw him go out onto the field, I could tell there was something different about him. I got the impression that he was moving, yes, but by staying in one place...That Maori player was like a tree, a great indestructible oak with deep roots and a powerful radiance--everyone could feel it. And yet you also got the impression that the great oak could fly, that it would be quick as the wind, despite, or perhaps because of, its deep roots.

-Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog