>If you’ve ever been aware of how the sky looks and the air feels just before and after a rain storm you’ll appreciate what I’m about to say.
    The news continues to be troublesome on it’s face. A perverse father who imprisons and rapes his own daughter, a political campaign that looks like it has no end in sight, continually escalating oil and food prices and rising unemployment, just to name a few. These are what we awaken to each day. It might just be enough to depress you.
    But wait a minute.
    Where else in Life, or Nature, can you find change that hasn’t been preceded and accompanied by, growing pains? Isn’t that what we’re experiencing? So many commentators and “doomsdayers” (or should I say “Armageddonites”) want to point to all the stressors and hold up the mirror of fear and destruction. Surely, they point out, with all the bad news (and as they see it prophetic events) The End is surely near.
    Not as I see it.
    What I see are the natural byproducts of transition. Growth pushes against restrictive boundaries and throws off waste. That’s how it happens. Further, I see not a transition for the worse but rather a transition for the highest good for all concerned.
    Why?
    Because the way we were living and the values we prized had ceased to serve our progress. We had become accustomed to stagnation and mediocrity in our lives. We had our values and priorities upside down. We were numbed by the technology and the media’s repetition of violent reporting and images to how much pain there is in the world. We had spiritually lost out way.
    Yesterday I received an e-mail from
a young man in upstate NY who is a trader on Wall Street who wrote that he was
depressed and unmotivated because he was “having his first bad year in
the stock market, ever. And it’s been raining here for 3 days.” Pain, as the Buddhist’s say, “isn’t meant to cause us suffering. It’s meant to wake us up.” And so all this “suffering” we’re experiencing is a gift to re-focus us on the Present, on what matters.
    I e-mailed the young man back and said that Life was trying to teach him something about worry and materialism. I suggested that perhaps he needed a “rinsing off” and that he should go out and run in the rain…to experience what was Present in his life.
    I have a lot more I could say on this topic but the sun just broke through the clouds and I’m going out for a walk.
    Perhaps first I need to get a little heated up.

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