© 2001-08, By Tom Brown

Sometimes life’s wake-up calls are the equivalent of being hit by a two-by-four. In my case, a long prison sentence has served this purpose. It’s the ultimate irony that I had to lose everything to find out what real wealth is, and I had to come to prison to learn how to be free.

Life’s cycles with its twists and turns often make it seem like we’re living many lifetimes within this one. Each step of the way, though, builds on the one before it. When nothing appears to help, I think of the stone cutter hammering away at a rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing on it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it splits in two. I know it was not that blow that did it, but the hundred that had gone before as well.

What we experience as ironies and paradoxes are, from a higher standpoint, the joyful play of Consciousness. The existence of this world with its endless multiplicity, its ceaseless variety, its wonder and beauty, is dependent on fundamental differences. After all, a world without these varying seasons would be intolerably dull; the mill of life requires some grist.

Life’s ironies are the result of continual changes taking place, and they can feel like a blessing or a curse, depending on our desires; the same rain welcomed by the flowers is mourned by picnickers wishing for a sunny day.

Doors open and close, energies rise and fall, and we are challenged to align our lives with the cycles of time and embrace each season for its own gifts. Each of us, in our own way, in our own time, is learning to open to the timeless unfolding of all the seasons of life.

George Washington Carver eloquently expressed this when he wrote, “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong because someday in life you will have been all of these.”

© 2001-08, Tom Brown