“You must learn to welcome consciously the most unexpected events of life, to be entirely transparent in front of them, without any motive, either right or wrong. At that moment avoid all judgment, for you do not know what law is in operation.” -Lizelle Reymond
I just lost a beautiful cousin to cancer last week, and as a human collective we lost a good one. Moments like these are impossible to reason – just wrong, and to I do not understand the order to this law.
Karma from past lives, as some believe, is sometimes the only way to explain losing someone good or explaining my niece being diagnosed with Brain Cancer at one year’s old. So deeply grateful she’s two and a half now.
How else do you explain…besides “life is suffering,” “bad things happen to good people”, and Cancer just seems to happen a lot more.
The only benefit I could muster from seeing my cousin at the wake, is that the destructive powers of Cancer and other tragedies, bring the opportunity to fully realize the beauty and goodness that is present in the world…but like everything else it is fleeting. This beauty and goodness, is so readily taken for granted or forgotten until it is gone or threatened.
Luckily, the ripples of kindness do not end with the life of the benefactor. Kindness, reverberate far beyond the beneficiary and the example serves as a teacher for us all . And in this case the example of my cousin’s beautiful soul extends throughout my cousin’s whole family: her husband and children, and stems from her parents and their parents. They all have this great heart, warmth, kindness and great wit!
The priest at the Funeral shared some words from Dr. Seuss that I really appreciated:
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” — Dr. Seuss
My call to action is appreciation. Appreciation for the blessings we have apparently needs reminding. I kept a daily gratitude journal a couple of years ago, and would write — no matter what — at the end of each day before bed. This served as a beautiful meditation to recognizing some beauty, kindness, connection…no matter how seemingly insignificant and no matter how “un-blessed” the day seemed. I found great benefit from the sense of contentment and peace before going to sleep.
Here’s a beautiful Opinions Article from the New York Time‘s last week titled “The Value of Suffering” by Pico Iyer…highly recommend.
I also found the words of Lizelle Reymond and the article above timely and beneficial with last week’s anniversary of 9/11. An opportunity to remember the tragedy and honor the heroes and victims.