I love this quote from Mark Nepo in the Book of Awakening: “Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything.” Let’s face it…we all suffer. At different times in our lives things are hard, life is tough and loss is unbearable. The same is true for every single one of us. But we don’t have to let those moments become everything. We don’t have to carry our moments of suffering into the rest of our life. We can learn to be joyful once again. We can know love again. We can heal and feel whole.
The answer is not to try to avoid suffering…the answer lies in not falling into misery. We can avoid that fall with hope. Hope is not some otherworldly spiritual voodoo. Hope is simply possibility. If you can just utter to your own self…’something else is possible here’…and start to feel that, you have saddled up on hope. You don’t have to know what it is or how it will work, you just have to begin to know that ‘something else is possible here’.
Repeat it again and again…something else is possible here. Breathe deeply…something else is possible here. On your walk, with every step…something else is possible here. This is not faking it. This is shifting consciously into possibility. Sometimes it happens ever so slowly…but it happens. A tiny bit of hope changes everything.
Love always
Paula
