CAN THERE BE ANOTHER WAY?

What if you were given another chance at your ife? What choices would you change? Is this the life you were meant to live? Do you feel as if you are off on the wrong track, that you might be living the choices of some other people who thought they were providing guidance and instead handed you their decisions early on?

Are you accomplishing what you came here to do? Do you have any idea what that even is? How can you find out? What does it matter?

I've discovered that if I want an answer to something, I can hold that question or thought in my mind and, somehow, someway, a deeper understanding is possible. Where does the answer come from? Several years ago, as my husband was silently saying his end-of-the-day "thank yous," I asked him, "Who are you thanking?" He answered, "What does it matter?"

A better question might be: Where do my questions come from? My ego, my mind, my heart, my soul? When my intention is to have more peace and love in my life, the answer will come from that source. Henri Nouwen, in THE GENESEE DIARY, says, "People expect too much from speaking, too little from silence." It only follows that when I ask a question internally, in order to hear the answer, I must become silent--a patient, committed, enduring quietness.

There are times when the answers just do not seem to come, at least not the answers we want or expect. I am reminded, again, of what Rainer Maria Rilke admonished in LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET:

"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even knowing it, live your way into the answer."

As we hold the questions in our minds, waiting to see if there can be another way to live, one that embodies more peace, we find ourselves having more compassion for the lack of peace in others. Our search for another way and the gradual opening of our hearts along the way leads us to a humbler, simpler way of living. The search itself becomes the path, the process itself evolves into the answer and, suddenly one day, we realize that our lives have changed, have become bigger, wider, able to embrace what we once found impossible.