The Rest Ceases to Matter

"If You Can Express Your Soul, The Rest Ceases to Matter" - Hugh's gapingvoid.com July 29, 2005 cartoon

Niti Bhan experienced a near-miss, a brush with the fragility of life while travelling in London July 7th. I am so happy to hear she was safe. She writes:

As I was walking, around 9.50am I heard a loud "whumpf" and saw smoke about 20 meters away. Somebody behind me said " What the fuck was that?"

That was the red double decker bus exploding.

Yesterday with more perspective she writes insightfully:

When just the difference of a few minutes, or a minuscule shift in time or space, may place you literally in the path of danger, you realise the value inherent in the every single moment you do have on this earth. We have just this one life to live. What is truly important? What do we value? Why? It's been just a minor shift in my orientation, but an extremely profound one.

Whenever I meet folks that lost a friend or family member in the tsunami from the same island I was, I am reminded of my mission which I totally swiped from Mother Theresa: "I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world."

This isn't at all the post I was going to write today. But it's the one I am. (I retracted what I was going to write because: "If you judge people, you have not time to love them."  - Mother Teresa) (More beautiful Mother Theresa quotes...)

I find it harder to fathom how we possibly go about each day as if somewhere lurking in our minds we don't sense: "I could get run over by the (proverbial) bus today." I'm convinced this thought isn't so buried.

When I’m on my deathbed, it’s unlikely that I’ll look back on my life and say, “Well, I’ve made some mistakes. But at least I snagged one of those Michael Graves toilet brushes [at Target] back in 2004.” Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material  goods has not necessarily made us happier. The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction  haven’t budged. That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning. As Columbia University’s Andrew Delbanco puts it, “The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.” - Daniel Pink, from A Whole New Mind (inc reviews) (more from this "abundance gap" excerpt)

I'm working on a business plan for a new media/business blog (openly, transparently) that has at its cornerstone this concept of the sacredness of the present moment. Every moment. There is a non-profit component and a generosity component to it (my belief is that spiritual teachings are offered on dana basis only) in addition to the for-profit.

The entire idea arose in pieces that fell into place out of my own brush with death. It just so happens many people spend more than forty hours a week in the workplace, so businesss is an important element of life. Underneath it all it's not really about business  anyway.

Do ordinary things with extraordinary love. - Mother Theresa

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride. - William James