I'm so glad I went grocery shopping today instead of skiing. As I was walking my cart back to the corral, I glanced up at the sky and was taken in by the magnitude and beauty of the sunset streaming through the clouds. For a moment, I saw the inter-connectedness of everything around us, and the earth and heavens and our place in it seemed huge and momentous and yet within grasp. It was a stop and smell the roses moment, but it made me realize that you can't take in the world around you on purpose, the world around you takes you in when you are ready for it.
It probably sounds like I dropped some E earlier today, but I swear I didn't. I've been reading this book that my new friend Colette turned me on to called The Way to Love by Anthony De Mello. The ideas in this book have completely turned my mind around with regard to how I perceive the world and the other travellers in it, and couldn't have come at a better time for me. I'm not going to summarize the book or its ideas, for each of us will get something different out of it, but I will say that I'm starting to feel as if I'm getting closer to happiness as a result of being exposed to the ideas therein.
I have a long way to go with this new philosphy but I really do feel liberated, or perhaps more accurately: I feel as if I am on the path to liberation. I feel closer to the people in my life than I ever did, and as contradictory as this might sound, it's a direct result of releasing any feelings of attachment I might have been harboring towards them.
Like I said, this all fell right in my lap at the right time - the book is a guide down a path that I had already been trying to get on (for some time now, dating back to my interest in Buddhism when I lived in Boston). I recommend it to anyone else who feels as though something's just not right with the way society has programmed us, but everyone is going to take something different from it.
