The Far Shore

A little boy grabbed hold of his cats tail while playing in the yard. The cat immediately began resisting, trying to pull away and making an awful noise. The boy's mom looked to see what was happening and when she saw it said to her son, "Johnny, let go of the cat...you're hurting it." Johnny replied, " But Mom, I'm just holding the cats tail. He's the one pulling it."People and life often bring to us things and situations we would rather not have to deal with, but if we struggle and resist against what is, we are like the cat in the story above. We bring unnecessary pain upon ourselves by the way we handle it. A slap on the face may hurt for a moment or two, but it will pass. A slap on the face compulsively "remembered" will continue to hurt us long after the physical sting has left.

No matter what others may say, it is possible to find and hold an imperturbable peace, no matter what others do to us. It is possible to endure a painful experience and be free of it...the moment it's over. Few, however, learn how this is accomplished. Most are doomed to internalize the painful moment and suffer for it all their lives, accumulating more and more pain with each successive moment improperly dealt with, often unto a climax of violence, toward others...or toward oneself.

The key to peace and happiness is learning to be objective to our own reactions to what life brings our way, to learn to be in control of our own emotional machinery so that others cannot control how we think, feel and react. If we are honest we will admit we are mostly powerless puppets on a string others can pull. If we are honest we will admit that persons, places and things, by the tiniest of pulls, can ruin our whole day...and our whole lives. When we are not in charge of ourselves, we are at the mercy of others.

But there is a way to regain control of our lives, to cut the invisible cords to our minds that allow others to control us through our emotions. The ability to fore go resenting anything...the string that ties us to negative people and experiences is the key to our freedom and true peace of mind. Anger, upset, and irritations are the doorway through which others get inside us...but no one can enter through a closed door. The ability to accept whatever comes our way, with maturity and grace, is an acquired gift, but one anyone can obtain if they have a heart to learn it. It is to have an attitude that flows with "what is," without putting up negative emotional resistance to it, especially to things we have no control over...like taxes...or getting fired for no good reason. Is there injustice in the world? You bet there is. But it is not so much what others do to us that harm us as much as it is our unwise way of dealing with it that does us the harm.

For example, too many of those who survived and were liberated from Hitler's concentration camps emerged bitter, traumatized and dehumanized for the experience...their anger, hatred and unforgiveness toward the experience and/or their captors made a carefree existence in freedom thereafter impossible...for a mind can not hold on to the past and be fully free to see, let alone experience, the blessings of the present moment at the same time. A mind that can not forget and let go of the past is not free, but remains a captive to the past...doomed to relive it over and over in the theater of their mind...either consciously or unconsciously...unto sickness and death. This is hell on earth.

Again, using the example of concentration camps, we also find recorded some who actually emerged better human beings for the experience. These learned...under fire of the worse kind...how to find and grow in grace and dignity in spite of the most horrible of circumstances. These are the few souls whose light actually grows brighter as they cross through each raging storm on the ocean of life...making of all injustice, suffering and pain a raft to the Far Shore.