“It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And he said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

I have not read this book and I don´t think I will read it either, but I found this quote from it that caught my attention as seems to tell a new theory, one I had not made up my mind with before, not from this point of view: life distracting us…

The first thing that came up in my mind when I read it was how many times did I ask myself “why” “this” “is happening” “right now” “to me”? I have questioned my self for not being able to keep the bike of life riding, I have questioned my mind looking for problems when things were going gently, I have questioned what I must have done in my past life for receiving in this one such a bunch of things to deal with (even when I don´t even believe in past lives!), and some others… in most of them, blaming… Blame is such an omnipresent unhappy thing…

I am not sure this mechanism of life distracting us is a possible thing to occur… when I was younger, I believed on the this theory that the “universe conspires to make our dreams come true”, but now, with life unraveling in ways I would have never expected, I have changed my mind: I believe that the challenges we get in life are what we need to grow, to overcome some features or our personalities and minds that are unhelpful for us and for others, to humble us, and very likely too, to find the meaning of our lives.

And somehow, the process seems to be: these are events that we do not choose (mostly), they are forced on us, they drawn us to our knees, and then, once we have spent some time lost, angry, frustrated, asking why and making promises we know we cannot comply with (wishing the event goes away!), we decided that we need to do something about it, and then the event becomes “Training wheels”. We need to start living life differently.

And somehow, we tend to start to discover that whatever we need (and at times, all we need is “to learn”) is already around us, and what we need is just to look at them. Here is where attention becomes essential as well as slowing down, stop running and start walking, or giving things the time they need to be, to rippen, to be ready. Maybe this is why some useful resources are going to the Camino, or to a retreat, and less fortunate, it is what a disease or losing a job create… a forced-slow down situation.

And with time and with a less hectic rhythm, it also comes the opportunity to look around, to appreciate the contrast, the beauty, what is lovely, the open hearts around us when others have closed. This is true for our lives and for everything in the universe we know and live in: without the cold days from the winter, we wouldn´t appreciate the warmth from the summer; without the wet autumm nourishing the seeds, we wouldn´t be able to harvest in the spring. However, certainly I do, complain about the cold days in the winter and the rains in the autumn…

… and there is something else, something that has come with modern life, and is the idea that we can “modify” whatever is right here for our comfort and convenience… we can turn on the air conditioner in the summer and live under 24°C (when not a fanatic living at 18°C), and we can turn on the boiler and walk barefoot and with a sleeve-less t-shirt inside the house as if it would be 30°C when it is freezing outside… and we complain in July (in the south hemisphere where I live) because tomatoes are super expensive and then we complain once more because they are tasteless (yet, we think we need to eat fresh tomatoes in the winter)…

Each day I am and try to deepen more my attention and awareness to the infinite examples that the universe gives me: from the four seasons reminding me the flow, how things change constantly, how everything can be so different from one moment to another, how my humor accompanies these seasons too, how there are things that can occur in a moment and not in other, how despite the boilers and heaters we cannot make winter be like summer and there is no other option than to wait for the seasons to pass, and how the boilers and heaters and the tomatoes in July only confuse us, giving the wrong idea that we can modify the nature of things, that we can make things happen as we wish, when we wish, and without spending the time in the in-between experiencing the cold and darker days and craving for juicy delicious tomatoes.

Nevertheless, this is the theory I live by… but I am a just started student.

Cris, Caminoheads South America Bureau Chief.