Monthly Archives: October 2019
What if you could change the past? A movie I watched recently, About Time, is the story of a man who happens to have the ability to travel back in time by imagining some situation from the past. He is then able to re-live the situation, changing the parts that didn’t go well, recreating his life the way he wants. He uses his power to help others as well as himself. As his life progresses, though, he finds there are…..
Recently, I happened to watch two inspiring documentaries. The first followed the extraordinary journey of three men who climbed to the summit of Meru, a mountain in the Himalayas. All previous attempts had failed, and the summit had been considered unreachable. The second film documented the nine-month voyage of six women who, incredibly, rowed eight thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean. Both extreme adventures required overcoming impossible obstacles, facing the ultimate physical and mental challenges that presented real confrontations with…..
Our lives appear to be a journey through time and space from birth to death. It seems we came from somewhere and are going somewhere as we live out the archetype of the pilgrim, the sojourner here on Earth. The strange thing is most of us don’t know where we came from, how and why we got here, or where we’re going. The spiritual quest starts as a search for answers to these fundamental questions. This quest is often referred…..
My first semester in college, I signed up for a philosophy class. The professor was short and stocky, had long hair and an attitude of defiance, even anger, which, I guess, was a sign of the times—it was 1968 and colleges were filled with defiant, angry people. I still remember the sound of his cowboy boots as he stomped up the aisle to the chalk board. I was already intimidated. “Who are you?” he wrote, the chalk clicking loudly against…..
Once during a weekly staff meeting at hospice, we were asked what we must let go of when facing death. Mary, one of the other therapists answered, “Well, for starters, we have to drop our idea of who we are.” I don’t know what the other therapists thought of what she said, but her answer resonated with me. I had been attending courses at an ashram in India on my vacations from work, and this was exactly what we were…..
