for the most part, meaning is where you find it. on the other hand, it seems sometimes it arrives where unexpected. but perhaps that is only a willingness to notice or draw it from everywhere you look. i’m not sure. whichever it may be, yet another snippet of interest, meaning, and synchronicity today.
this piece, found in, of all places, as a signature on a forum in which i’m active. i find it curious because the place is not one in which you’d expect to find such things. all the more reason it stood out.
In strategy your spiritual bearing must not be any different from normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
i was just considering the other day how sometimes, i get all ‘serious’ about things and my overall manner shifts to ‘try and be’ x, y, or z. and, of course, how foolish that is. if i’m being x, y, or z, then i’m not really being who i am, am i?
this, the trick the mind plays, as if it is possible to be something other than what we are. or to incorporate something we see around us until and unless we know it on more than a purely intellectual level.
i remember writing somewhere along the way that you have to conceive of something before you can attain it. ‘dream it before it can be real’ is another way i’ve said it along the way. in this moment, i’m chuckling over the irony of the statement ‘be the change’ and of how i said this to myself before i knew there was a Ghandi, ‘people who want the world to change do not speak of how the world should change. people who want the world to change live as if they world they would see, is.’
same concept, different words. what you are, what you want to be, they are a dichotomy until you figure out that the only way to be a thing is to stop thinking you are not already. being is, therefore, doing… not thinking about doing. kind of like yoda said, ‘there is no try. there is only do.’ hah.
i am, of course, thinking of all of this in the context of stopping all this ‘trying’ in relation to a number of things in my life. determination through calm, being the same as who i am in every moment, stop trying to be something i’m not, be content in who i am and let the organic process of finding the way to being the things that would be helpful manifest as they will, naturally, once i accomplish the whole ‘stop trying’ thing.
the funny part is, i used to be unified in that way. i don’t remember when it changed. but i’m thankful of there being this many parallels and signs along the path to help me find my way to it once more. very thankful indeed.