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Moving house, part 2

22 April, 2010 in Religion/Spirituality/Faith, Taoism | 3 comments

A while ago, I mentioned that we would have to move house again soon.  The story of the past couple of months has been a great object-lesson for me about facing uncertainty.  I’ll tell you why, and what I’ve learned so far.

Last August we moved into a large, 5-bedroom house along with one of our friends, and another friend joined us for part of the year as well.  It was really exciting to have space to share and people to share it with!  I had hoped that this might be a place where we could settle for a while and make available for people who need a place to stay.  It has been really, really great to combine raising a family with the openness of community living.  I’ll miss it.

But we found out in February that our landlord wants us to leave by the end of June so that he can let it out to students again for more money.  (A lot more!)  So much for my hopes.  Neither of our friends would be around for much longer than that anyway, so we couldn’t look for another big house to share.  It felt like a giant, disappointing step backwards to look for another smaller house to rent on our own.  Coupled with that is the emotional exhaustion of packing up my life yet again to move to yet another impermanent place.  After 6 moves in just as many years, I’ve started to feel like some kind of refugee.  If there’s a lesson to be learned here about the impermanence of life, I think I’ve started to get it by now!

In desperation and without much hope, I did some tentative research on mortgages.  We had tried this angle before without success, and this time around our finances weren’t much improved, and the economy had collapsed in the meantime.  I ended up speaking to an incredibly helpful mortgage adviser though, which began a very long and complicated chain of events.  It seems almost miraculous, but we ended up with a mortgage and a small house to call our own!

So now is the time when I step back, scratch my head and mutter to myself, ‘Holy crap!  What just happened?’

Life is funny that way.  We see how things begin, but we have no idea where they might end.  And when the end comes, good or bad, it’s just the beginning of something else.  Some people preach that ‘everything will work out alright’, because of providence or some idea about ‘the universe’.  I don’t.  Other people decide that they will probably end up being disappointed in the end no matter what, and so become cynical.  I’m not like that either.

I’m learning that any expectations — for good or ill — can be very dangerous.  ’God is good’; but I don’t expect him to solve all my problems.  My life is not the whole story… just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.  So the best thing I can do is keep my mind open, accept whatever comes and work with it.

It is tempting to get carried away with relief that my family and I will hopefully have somewhere to put down our roots and call home for a few years.  But if it’s unwise to get distressed by difficult circumstances, it’s just as foolish to get excited.  Who knows what the next chapter of my story will bring?  I’ll just try to keep a level head and an open heart.

Not to mention an open door :)

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Tao Te Ching, Chapter 9

5 October, 2009 in Religion/Spirituality/Faith, Taoism | 4 comments

This post is part of an ongoing series.  You can find out more by clicking here.

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.

There is a common proverb that says, ‘Haste makes waste’.  Like these proverbs from the Tao Te Ching, it means that when we try too hard to do something, our extra effort can cause us to fail.  Unfortunately, we usually don’t bring this wisdom to mind until after we make a huge blunder.  What if we considered this before starting our work, instead of when it’s too late?

We need to often ask ourselves, ‘Why do I try too hard, work in an anxious rush?’  I think the end of this chapter gives us an answer.  But first we have some concrete examples of this effect:

Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

It’s hard to disagree with this.  And yet almost all of all continue to fall into both of these traps.  So I ask again, why do we do this??

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

Do your work.  Step back.  Pause.  Repeat.

Why do we spill our bowls and blunt our knives and end up slaves to money and popularity?  Simply because we desire fuller bowls, and sharper knives, and hefty bank accounts and hoardes of compliments.  The person who follows Tao does none of these things.  They see what needs doing, and they do it.  Then they stop, and let it go.  That’s it.  They never do too much, or too little.

As a child, I used to play a game that was called ‘Trust’.  This game involves one person standing on a height of about 3 feet or so, while two rows of people stand behind her holding out their arms.  The idea is that the person has to fall backwards, stiff as a board, into the arms of her comrades.  She can’t see them, and her instincts tell her that she is going to have a painful fall!  In order to play the game, your faith in your friends has to overcome your anxiety about falling.

To me, following the Tao is just the same.  My natural instincts tell me that if I try harder, I am more likely to succeed.  I am motivated by the fear of failure.  They tell me that more money means more freedom, not less!  And if I try hard to impress people, I will have more influence on them, not the other way around.  Yet faith (and experience) tell me that the opposite is true:  freedom comes from knowing what to do, and when to stop.  This is ‘The only path to serenity‘:  the only way to be content.

Who knew?  Well actually, it seems we all do.  It’s just that we don’t have enough faith to let go.

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The fear of a child (and the joy of parenting!)

19 May, 2009 in Religion/Spirituality/Faith | 1 comment

Olivia and I were at home this morning when some men came to tear down and replace the fence between our back garden and next door’s.  Unfortunately for Olivia, this process involved a large electric saw and lots of other banging and scraping noises!  She is at the age where she can recognise that something is scary, but definitely not old enough to objectify her feelings when I tell her it’s not actually dangerous :)

She is very funny when she’s scared, because she stops whatever she’s doing and freezes.  Completely.  Her face goes completely blank.  If something has startled her she might cry after the fact, but if it’s something continuing (like the sound of the saw) she doesn’t usually cry.

Of course I have to show her that it’s not really dangerous, so we tried looking at the window as they were working.  Not that I think it will make her stop being afraid of course, but it seems important anyway.  So then we went upstairs and shut the windows and doors and sat on the other side of the house, in our bedroom, and read some books.  By this time they had stopped for a while and she probably started to forget about it.

But of course they soon started again.  I was in the middle of reading a story and I looked over at her sitting on the other side of the bed.  She was frozen completely and her big eyes were just fixed on me, unblinking.  I could tell that she was so scared on the inside, and was determined not to show it.  So I said, ‘Do you want a hug?’ and she just nodded, without a sound.  I held out my arms and she came over and buried her head in my chest.  Then she reached behind her to make sure that my arms were covering her well enough.  Olivia always gives good hugs, but this time it was something else:  she needed to feel that she was safe and secure, out of harm’s reach.

What a blessing to be able to give that security to someone else!  Maybe that’s the best thing any parent can do.  I hope I can always be there for her when she needs that reassurance.  And of course we all need that sense of unbreachable security — from family or friends or familiar places.  Sometimes we find it in spirituality or religion.  Materialists argue that supernatural reassurance is an illusion.  I think that the experience of complete trust and faith in someone else has a power that transcends the physical world.  I think it is an anchor for the human experience, and a pointer towards something that people once had that we have lost, or something that we will someday achieve… or maybe both.

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