Life is Enough

Danish author Hans Christian Andersen once wrote, "'Life alone is not enough,' said the butterfly. 'You must also have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.'"

And I agree with him to a certain extent. The things and experiences we love - sunshine, freedom, a little flower in the butterfly's case - can make all the difference between enjoying our lives and merely existing, dragging ourselves from one day to the next without any moments of transcendence and joy.

Life is a mystery - we have no control over when and how we enter it, nor how or when we will leave it. And, to be honest, we don't actually have that much control over the time in between. All of us grow older, and closer to our final day in this life,  at a rate of 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year. I was only saying yesterday, "I can't believe it's June already." Because the first five months of the year seem to have simply flown past.

But I recognise that this is a subjective view and that for some people, these last five months will have dragged, seeming to last for an eternity. In fact, all our views are subjective, precisely because each of us inhabits a unique body, each of us perceives the present in a unique way, depending on our past experiences, and our physical, mental and spiritual health. 

I believe that each of us can choose how we respond to the things which happen to us, which can make all the difference. So many things are outside our control (or at least, partly so) - our health, how other people interact with us, the body and mind and spirit we were born with...  There is a fabulous blogpost about this by Lori Deschene, on the Tiny Buddha blog, here. To summarise what she says: we cannot control other people and how they interact with us; the past, the future, outcomes of what we do, how we age, our overall health, that we will get hurt, and the suffering in the world. 

But we CAN control how we respond to all these - which is also explained in the blogpost. It can be quite difficult to choose not to engage negatively with negative experiences, but if we can manage to step back and not allow ourselves to react emotionally, our lives could be much happier. It's a matter of learning to let go of what we can't control and of appreciating the good experiences. Easy to write, difficult to do! But so worth the attempt.