Realisations can only be understood backwards
A realisation recently came into focus. It’s that I now see, in a way that I haven’t before, that everything that’s happened in my life, everything I’ve done, couldn’t have been any other way.
I mean, I’ve known that, in theory. I have understood, from a Buddhist perspective, that it is true, using a Buddhist kind of logic. But it’s like that realisation has landed in me.
Like most realisations, it’s experienced as an absence. In this case, an absence of guilt or regret, an absence of worry. There’s a sense of being cleaned out. Someone’s gone through with a broom.
Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” It’s the same with practice. It’s only in retrospect that we see something is different. And then, it’s so easy not to notice the change.
There’s a phenomenon that I call ‘the new normal’, whereby changes are so quickly adapted to that we forget how we were before. Take a moment to think back.
Is there anything that no longer happens that used to occur regularly? Something you used to worry about that you don’t now? Or something that annoyed you and no longer does? Celebrate your hard-won freedoms, even if you’re not sure how you won them!
