Good Morning Everyone,
Yesterday afternoon we met with the director of Holloman Air Force Base’s Outdoor Recreation program. They have a resiliency project intended to help airmen deal with the stress of deployment. Rev. Soku Shin and I have volunteered to offer a contemplative practices piece in this project.
It is always interesting to me to see my response to being on a military installation. I am at first pleased to see so many young faces engaged in service to their country. This is followed by remembrances of how my own young face aged so during combat and after when I was one of them.
Resiliency, like endurance, doesn’t come without cost. All of us today are encountering these costs. The prices of gasoline, heating oil, food, and medical care paired against tighter credit, lack of insurance, lower wages, and fewer and fewer meaningful and productive jobs: these are the everyday bells of mindfulness demanding our adaptation in today’s world. Are we taught how to encounter and deal with these changes in our society?
There are always effects of causes: change will happen and consequences follow. Practicing to open our heart/mind in the flow is a principal way of encountering and dealing with the onslaught of change. This requires faith in the cosmos. It requires a big view, an all encompassing view, of time and being. We cannot get this view without practice.
Next we must practice to engage our world in ways that are meaningful and productive, which is to say, healthy and open. Open systems have the opportunity to give and receive. Open systems are living systems. Without meaning, as Victor Frankl pointed out from the horrors of concentration camps, human beings lose the will to live.
From Victor Frankl: For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. Read more here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/v/viktor_e_frankl.html#ixzz1fTksbdRp
So, find something meaningful and do it.
Be well.
Yesterday afternoon we met with the director of Holloman Air Force Base’s Outdoor Recreation program. They have a resiliency project intended to help airmen deal with the stress of deployment. Rev. Soku Shin and I have volunteered to offer a contemplative practices piece in this project.
It is always interesting to me to see my response to being on a military installation. I am at first pleased to see so many young faces engaged in service to their country. This is followed by remembrances of how my own young face aged so during combat and after when I was one of them.
Resiliency, like endurance, doesn’t come without cost. All of us today are encountering these costs. The prices of gasoline, heating oil, food, and medical care paired against tighter credit, lack of insurance, lower wages, and fewer and fewer meaningful and productive jobs: these are the everyday bells of mindfulness demanding our adaptation in today’s world. Are we taught how to encounter and deal with these changes in our society?
There are always effects of causes: change will happen and consequences follow. Practicing to open our heart/mind in the flow is a principal way of encountering and dealing with the onslaught of change. This requires faith in the cosmos. It requires a big view, an all encompassing view, of time and being. We cannot get this view without practice.
Next we must practice to engage our world in ways that are meaningful and productive, which is to say, healthy and open. Open systems have the opportunity to give and receive. Open systems are living systems. Without meaning, as Victor Frankl pointed out from the horrors of concentration camps, human beings lose the will to live.
From Victor Frankl: For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. Read more here: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/v/viktor_e_frankl.html#ixzz1fTksbdRp
So, find something meaningful and do it.
Be well.
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