Life's Not So Rare Lessons, Nov. 28, 2011

Sunday morning, I was recuperating from a bit of sickness, and happened to catch an episode of Super Soul Sunday on OWN.  It was an interesting show with Oprah Winfrey talking to Mark Nepo, the author of The Book of Awakening, a daily companion book to 'help people meet their days and inhabit their lives.'  Nepo, who published the book in 2000 following a battle with cancer, said the book turned out to be a spiritual first-aid kit.  The Book of Awakening catapulted to fame in 2010, when Oprah listed it as one of her favorite things.

During Sunday's show, Oprah read one of her favorite passages from the book, which I'll share here.

After hearing the passage, an ancient Hindu teaching, it really made me think.  So often in our lives, we are confronted by pain and don't really know how to bear it.  But the profound message behind the teaching is that pain, like everything else in our lives much be taken in context.

Putting our experiences into perspective will allow us to deal with them better.

This might seem hard to do at first.  Often times, especially with negative situations, it's hard to get past how uncomfortable they are.  We forget to think about the bigger picture and only focus on how we're immediately affected.  But everything functions within a broader spectrum.  And that amount of pain, discomfort, heartache, or whatever, is serving a purpose within the broader spectrum of you.  I think what the teaching was trying to say is that unless we understand that we extend beyond the pain, we will always succumb to its bitterness.

Be a lake, not a glass.

The smaller the receptacle, the more force or impact anything that comes in contact with it has.  By being a lake, or expanding ourselves outside of the moment and seeing everything as a whole, we lessen how much we're impacted by pain.

I think being the lake is key in positive situations too.  So often, we get caught up in our successes and joys, so much so that we forget to keep them into perspective.  We become stagnant, because we get stuck in the moment, instead of stretching ourselves towards the bigger picture.

Once we learn to take things into perspective, we'll live fuller lives.  And isn't that a step towards happiness?

Marcus Jamison, the Rare Poet