Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
- Helen KellerOver and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare?
- Joseph Campbell
Although I’ve been meditating and journaling for fifty years, I learned a lot about myself in the course of writing this short book, now close to completion. It explores using meditation and journaling to understand the hidden patterns of one’s life.
I have in my life experienced both moments of profound peace and extreme adventure and risk. In journaling and meditation, the guidance I’ve gotten back has consistently suggested that I orient my life toward the places and times where I’ve experienced deep peace. In practice though, I’ve tended to gravitate toward scenarios involving risk and adventure. I seem to have an affinity for scenarios where the outcome is unpredictable. Unpredictable people, sometimes wildly unpredictable people and scenarios, have always interested me. Had I paid closer attention to the messages my journal was offering, my life would have involved less grief and wasted effort.
The question I struggled with most in writing this book is how challenging to make it. For instance, an early version posed the following questions:
When you go deep in meditation, ask yourself whether or not you believe that you are worthy of your dreams. Do you believe in yourself, and your values, enough to become the kind of person that you imagine you could be? Do you have the courage and discipline to confront your comfort zone? To make the sacrifice?
These challenging questions suggest a practice different from that of building one’s life around living a deep and profound peace.
I have friends who talk about making a major life change in an effort to live a more meaningful life. That transition though inevitably involves risk and leaving one’s comfort zone. After listening to this kind of talk for years – talk without action -– I’ve concluded that they have an intuitive understanding of where they find peace, and have created lives, consciously or unconsciously, around that understanding. So while writing a book about using journaling and meditation to find peace would be helpful to people with my affinity for risk, it is probably redundant to many others.
As I wrote the book, I came to the conclusion that the common denominator –- the search that we’re all on in this precious gift called life –- is a search for wholeness, for beauty. It is a search for where we feel complete as human beings, where we feel in harmony with ourselves, our inner world, our friends and family, and where we find beauty. Not beauty in the superficial surface sense of course, but beauty in the larger sense of the beauty of life, the beauty of the natural world, the beauty of friendship and connection. The beauty of an inner peace based on harmony.
. . .
As an aside, while Joseph Campbell wrote often and eloquently about embarking on the Hero’s Journey, he was remarkably reluctant to embark on one himself. He came from money and sought out a low-risk life as a tenured professor, author and lecturer. I think he did though find a degree of peace and harmony, a wholeness, in the life he created for himself.
For Helen Keller, born in 1880, life was a daring adventure, though not from choice. She contracted an illness at the age of 19 months, probably meningitis, and lost her hearing and sight. Her courage in creating a life out of those disabilities is inspiring, as was her sensitivity to beauty. She too created a life of inner peace and harmony. A wholeness.
. . .
One July afternoon at our ranch in the Canadian Rockies I rode toward Helen Keller’s cabin. Along the wagon trail that ran through a lovely wood we had stretched a wire, to guide Helen when she walked there alone, and as I turned down the trail I saw her coming.
I sat motionless while this woman who was doomed to live forever in a black and silent prison made her way briskly down the path, her face radiant. She stepped out of the woods into a sunlit open space directly in front of me and stopped by a clump of wolf willows. Gathering a handful, she breathed their strange fragrance: her sightless eyes looked up squarely into the sun, and her lips, so magically trained, pronounced the single word “Beautiful!” Then, still smiling, she walked past me.
I brushed the tears from my own inadequate eyes. For to me none of this exquisite highland had seemed beautiful. I had felt only bitter discouragement over the rejection of a piece of writing. I had eyes to see all the wonders of woods, sky and mountains, ears to hear the rushing stream and the song of the wind in the treetops. It took the sightless eyes and sealed ears of this extraordinary woman to show me beauty, and bravery.
- Frazier Hunt, Redbook.
. . .
An update on the book, and Journal Meditations binder: Not quite completed, but close. I thought it would be printed and mailed this week, but now think next. The wait will be worth it. It is turning out to be more than I envisioned and hoped for.