Civilizations rise and fall, and new ones rise (then fall) in their place. Chapters in our lives begin, flourish and end, only to begin in other ways and in other places….whether our jobs, finances, families, relationships, beliefs, and our own lives.
The unchanging axiom is that everything changes, and impermanence underpins all.
Life unfolds in enormous cycles, down through sub-cycle within sub-cycle to the most minute cycles. We try to anticipate the cycles and prepare for them.
We struggle with endings of all kinds, surprised when people, places and circumstances come to an end. “This shouldn’t happen”, we say, but they do happen, and they always have and they always will. Things begin and end, begin and end, begin and end. And although we don’t fully know the mystery of the ‘why’, it must be so.
We cannot control the cycles for they are infinitely larger than us. We cannot control the orbit of the earth around the sun, and the sun around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. We cannot control the passing of one epoch into another. We are, however, part of all such larger ecosystems and ages, and their greater unfolding, evolutionary cycles.
We have our paths and purposes within them, and these paths and purposes matter to the whole. And so, we see we can align and work with the mystery, in the moments of our lives. We can look around and see what is ours to create, change, nourish, attend to. We can mark out a place for ourselves within the overall scheme of things that is uniquely our own, and contribute.
It makes it easier, then, to accept the beginnings and the endings, and to somehow find peace and purpose within the greater cycles….and for your moment, to create, live, share and flourish.
*
As you look around your life and world now and you view the enormity of what needs addressing, what it is the particular note that you can play in the overall symphony….without which, the symphony could not be a symphony at all? Without which things don’t change? You’re that important, yes.
What is the song you can sing, that you are singing? The garden you can plant, that you are planting?
What do you care for and nourish? What will you leave for your children and for future generations?
The seeming ‘smallest’ acts change everything.