Grace and Gratitude

Weekends are for 'sharpening the saw'--the seventh habit of Dr Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We should never be too busy sawing and completely forget about sharpening it. Renewal and rejuvenation is essential to maintain a healthy working life.

I'm happy to have been able to jog both today and yesterday. And today, I also spent some time cleaning out some old stuff and as a result, I have 3 more bags of 'offerings' to the God of Karma--stuff that I have not touched for ages (some for more than 10 years). These are old karma that needs to permanently resolved with gratitude. One feels greatly unburdened after such an exercise.

We spend so much of our lives chasing new experiences. The human soul needs to be constantly challenged, entertained and awed. When we are young, this spirit surges ahead like a mighty tsunami, overwhelming and obliterating everything along its path. As it moves, it expends its energy and finally the tsunami has completely worked out its 'karma'.

When we seek new experiences--we are actually looking for outlets for karma to find its resolution. It is karma that gives us life. It is a force that creates and destroys. It is, as Dylan Thomas puts it: "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower...is my destroyer". Karma always mean consequences. When we use the energy of karma to chase new experiences, sometimes we generate even more karma, creating an endless cycle of action and reaction.

The meditative man is like a good heat sink. He is constantly dissipating heat/karma. That is what meditation does in your mind--it isolates thoughts, and then let them decay naturally. Everything in the universe decays and dies. Meditation is simply good karmic management--an absolutely necessary mental house-keeping activity. Meditation helps to maintain the equilibrium of the system and allow karma to be dissipated efficiently.

Every action begins with karmic energy from a single thought. This thought gets its energy from another previous thought. The thought either snowballs into a bigger one by gathering energy from other related thoughts or it simple loses momentum and fades away. In the silence of our meditation, you'll know which thought does what. We do a 'ps -ef' on our mental processes as we strive to become better system administrators of the mind.

Sometimes, we just need to reboot the system. And that's what I try to do with my mind on weekends. Cleared of karmic residues, it is ready to tackle the start of another week--one which my heart welcomes with grace and gratitude.