“What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash — one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.” — Eckhart Tolle, from Stillness Speaks
This quote is quite a jolt when taken literally. Distilling all the ubiquitous dissonance in life becomes a juggling act of our senses, beliefs, character, and integrity. Most of our problematic life concerns are beyond our control in the last analysis. The ideologies that many of us are are taught from a very early age, is that we have some control over the continuing events in our life process. Once we are imprinted with that understanding, we begin to create a domino effect of discontent contingent on processed outcome. Eckhart Tolle put it another way, “Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.”
In order to delineate this conditioning that has happened to all if not most of us over time, takes first the awareness that the delineation is necessary, and the intial desire to begin the tedious task of peeling back the layers, one at a time. Not many individuals possess the insightful awareness to begin this very critical process. Oliver Wendell Holmes had another idea that gives sway to this consciousness, “The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.” Given this potential in this moment, are you consciously aware of what direction you may be moving, or do you even care?
These concepts are challenging at best for all of us, and given the circumstances of the individual may not seem necessary, important or worthy of our energy, time or consideration. This then becomes a dismissive quantification of personal choice. Given the opportunity at different times of one’s life, and comprehending the responsible accountablity of that specific choice, focuses on these words of Carl Jung, “Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.” Distilling this further, we can choose to be part of the problem, or the solution contingent upon our acceptance of self conscious awareness in time . . . which may run out before we become pro-active in knowing the very essence of our lives which is that dash, between our birth and death. JLR