Nothing Bad Happens in Life
Find Joy in Returning to Your Nature
"If I keep a green bough
in my heart,
the singing bird will come."
Life's rich complexities reveal how we are brought toward harmony and dissolution in the same way that substances change, or how forces collide, harmonize and eventually transform. Science has begun to take us deep into an unknown world that we have always taken for granted, but never really understood.
Our senses cannot detect the symphony that plays
as life fluctuates in one giant organism of movement.
When we meet life with the change in perspective that the time demands, we discover the power of nature driving all things to become.
In the song of a migrating whale that we cannot hear, or in the symmetry and perfection of electrons that we cannot see, life seeks abundance, harmony and variation. Like waves moving back and forth from one shoreline to another, we can detect life’s gentle thread that ripples in a chain of sustenance from one species to another. Whether we view life at the molecular level, or nature’s symbiotic economies of survival, everywhere is meaningful diversity, symmetries and spectacular design.
Why nature should propel itself toward the pursuit
of excellence is perhaps, better left a mystery.
We are an integral part of this tapestry and the fact that we can appreciate its innate complexities makes us unique, but in no way more special. Nature reveals its enormous power to sustain and strengthen its creatures to those who would follow its ways.
At a fundamental level of life, we observe the interplay of opposing forces that create movement and vitality in the universe. When a warm and cold front meet, it generates winds, electricity and rain. Oppositional energy drives life at all levels and the human journey is no different.
Long before scientists identified the diverging forces within the atom, the ancient Chinese described all manifestation as the interaction of the negative Yin and the positive Yang. They knew that without this oppositional energy, life would lose its vitality and become stagnant. Conflict is not a negative event, but the necessary way that all things evolve toward harmony or dissolution. From the perspective of growth and innovation, Nothing Bad Happens in Life.
Conflict releases stabilized energy within that gives charge to a situation, which oftentimes feels uncomfortable. This sudden surge of energy can lead to a sense of crisis where we are forced to explore new ways of seeing old situations. When this charge is observed to be the latent source of our vital power or te, we can redirect this evolutionary energy more productively. The master said: "When meeting contention in another, one would do well to examine the self."
In the mysterious mirror, experience has a way
of reflecting back all that we need.
By changing how we view difficulty, we open to the same forces driving life in its pursuit of excellence. In a changing world, all species are being made stronger; it is simply nature's way.
In the physical world, energy is exchanged equally until balance is achieved. Once stable however, forces continue to generate additional movement. To believe that we can remain stationary in a world that is exploring novelty and diversity, our fear of the unknown can make us defensive. This rigid approach can only lead to decay. To participate in life’s evolutionary processes requires a willingness to remain open. The right path through this flow, moving all around us is the Way.
