Balance

I would argue that an authentic life is a life that is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions, and honorably inhabits that threshold where the light and darkness..and all the beginnings and endings of one’s own life engage.

John O’Donohue, Wandering in the Fields of Wonder

I have called Eckhart’s way ‘the way of Paradox’, because he sees the Reality of the Divine in the clash of opposites. This tension has to be experienced in our daily life; this is the practice of detachment. But it also has to be experienced in our thinking and talking and this involves paradox.

Cyprian Smith, The Way of Paradox

Light and darkness, beginning and endings, love and disgust are some of the many opposites that live within me.  Day by day, moment by moment, my feelings will change from hope to despair, calm to agitation, openness to closeness and then back around again.  I am thrown about so easily when unexpected challenges catch me off guard.  I am expecting things to go one way when they go another and my courage fails. Who is it, I wonder, that clings so strongly to expectations? 

I am learning to be less attached to these momentary feelings and emotions.  When I am able to detach my identity, my self-worth to the particular outcome, I have more capacity to see things as they are and to respond with more freedom.  This detachment to what is unfolding does not mean I am suppressing or ignoring my feelings and experience but am actually becoming more present and aware of what is unfolding.  When I am aware of these attachments, I can sit behind them rather than getting caught up in the chatter judging, fearing, liking, and disliking.  I am less likely to act from these places of fear, grasping, and negativity.  I find faith again in the fluidity of action. 

That the experience of the Divine is in this clash of opposites is startling.  I have so longed for that quiet, peaceful, safe inner place close to God beyond shame, fear, pain. But God is much wilder than this found in the dance between the light and the dark, the emptiness and fullness, the hope and the despair. God can’t be pinned down.  And to be part of this wild dance, as we are, gives us great energy for our lives.