Tag Archives: sadness

Compassion, Human Condition, Humanity, Philosophy, Society

Keep Your Hands & Feet Inside the Car at All Times

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-changes
-David Bowie

Life is a roller coaster ride, a wobbly high wire act, at best. For all the self-help books and therapists and support groups and gurus, in the end it’s just a crap shoot. Life is anyone’s guess.

Even though I know all this, and my mantra, for the last few years at least, has been “Keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times and remain seated until the ride comes to a complete stop” – even though I’m no stranger to disappointment, failure and heartbreak, and I know better than to let my guard down,  it’s still ridiculously easy to grasp onto the faintest pattern of twists and turns and adjust to the ride with expectations born of habit, especially if the ride becomes comforting and familiar.

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Art, Compassion, Culture, Humanity, Philosophy

Shift Happens

1672 sculpture Entombment of Christ, showing Mary Magdalene crying.

1672 sculpture Entombment of Christ, showing Mary Magdalene crying.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Shift happens. Throughout my life – and probably in yours – there have been moments when life has tilted. Sometimes the reason why is pretty obvious: a birth, a death, that moment when something “clicks”. Sometimes the reason is less obvious, something just shifts. The result is the same.  Things change, and some things will never be the same.

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