Success and failure are only ideas. What looks, in one moment, to be a huge success, can easily take on the odor of failure. Success for one can often be interpreted, by another, as that persons biggest failure. So much depends upon ones own interpretation of the events. If you look hard enough, you will always find ways to turn one into the other. Traditional Native American craftspeople often integrate a flaw into the artistic patterns they work with. It is to remind them and others there is nothing that is perfect. Within the context of these imperfections, perfection is attained. Perhaps the power of the flaw is to reflect the perfect concept of balance all is ever-changing. Things are as they are, and no matter how we try to deny it, every moment in our life depends on the ones that precede it; every moment is a foundational building block upon which the others that follow rely. Our wiring makes it possible for us to apply one moment to the next. But a moment is alive. It is always shifting, changing, building up or breaking down, and perhaps, most important, has no judgment of itself. It simply is. By understanding and accepting the nature of the moment, we can come to terms with our role in it: The most we can do is to respond honestly to it, apply what weve picked up from the moments before it and use them all to the best of our ability. And, of course, there will always be something we missed. That is called a lesson. There are no moments without lessons. In the healing arts sometimes these lessons are excruciating. Death itself is a prime example. Death makes way for new life. Period. Because everything will die, the healer must recognize death as a form of healing, for it, too, is a reflection of a circle coming to completion. The lesson here is that there is nothing living on this earth that has not sprung from death. A real tough extension of that is that it really seems especially for those who work in critical care areas that they are used in some way to be agents of death. Many people in the healing arts have been in situations where, to their total exasperation they discover that every action they took, every decision they made, seemed to contribute to the demise of the person who was in their care. And then, from the vantage point of hindsight, it can be seen that the ripple effects of what were deemed to be destructive moments actually contributed significantly to a movement toward a much greater good. The same hand of God that intervenes to work through us to preserve or protect life also works through us to bring it to its conclusion. Most of the time, we dont notice it, and when we do, we do everything in our power to deny it. But for those working in the healing arts, where there are so few working on so many, it is almost inevitable that this sense of agentry both for life AND death be experienced. The trick is to learn how to review and evaluate your past performance no matter how extreme -- without agonizing over it. It is in the agonizing over circumstances that we lose the present moment. In our headlong drive to qualify and quantify and judge each moment that has passed, we miss the moment that is. We do it all the time. That, perhaps, is the most important lesson of them all; moments are too few and precious to squander. What sets us off balance, more than anything else, is getting locked into the failure of the moment that just passed and, as a result, we miss a string of crucial moments that follow. On one level, this is a disruption of the free passage, or movement, of energy. Our jobs, as healers, is to keep that passage clear. Moments are simply things that happen. First this. Now this. Now this. Now this. Judgment is all about living in the that and missing the this. By integrating conscious understanding that lessons are all there are, you can free yourself to have many more moments that are connected with each other. Your unbroken connection to each moment is, like an untwisted, un-nicked water hose, the vehicle through which healing energy flows. |
