Nature has so much to teach us. All we have to do is observe the perfectly orchestrated change of seasons to see that Mother Nature has her own intelligence. Trees don't try to grow; they just grow. Animals don't need parenting books; they instinctively know how to carry, give birth, and raise their young. Bees pollinate flowers because it's their job. Nature knows how to go with the flow, and nature accepts the facts of life: beauty, birth, creation, gorgeous sunsets, survival of the fittest, violence, death, devastating fires, floods, and earthquakes. There's an amazing ability and necessity within nature to accept life on life's terms.
On the other hand, while there are plenty of exceptions, the developed world has a difficult time accepting the most basic givens of life, and we expend a huge amount of precious energy resisting those very conditions. You can probably think of dozens of ways that we repress and fight nature. Especially in the United States, we have a tendency to form an opinion about the way we think something should be, and then fight like hell to make it so.
For instance, as a culture, we've decided that normal aging is unacceptable, so we take pills, buy expensive creams, exercise compulsively (or beat ourselves up because we don't), undergo plastic surgery, dye our hair, etc. Anything to look younger (or thinner), because the consensus is that aging is a terrible fate. Likewise, dying a natural death, even at a ripe old age, has become somewhat unusual because doctors are trained to keep people alive at all costs.
Conversely, Buddhism and many other traditions embrace the facts of human life. To a large extent, acceptance of what is forms the cornerstone of the relationship with life, the universe, and all that exists. When we accept that loss is a part of life, it is a different experience than when we resist the loss. Either way, we may grief stricken when a loved one dies, but when we're grounded in the fact that physical death is natural and inevitable, we suffer much less than when our grief is complicated by the belief that something has gone terribly wrong.
There is great change in the air at this time. Every day, I wake up feeling as if things are moving and changing so fast that I can barely keep up, or that there's a grief just under the surface that I don't really understand. It feels like a 2012 thing----a time of big transition. But I believe that as long as we find a way to take a few deep breaths when we feel stressed out, and go with the flow as much as possible, everything will fall into place just fine.
So, what do you resist, and in what areas of life do you go with the flow? I'd love to hear from you.
