This impossible world
How cultivating a spacious mind and heart helps to anchor love and hope in times of change
If you celebrate Christmas, it is a time when you are asked to lean into the impossible and validate the wonder and magic which I think is always a useful thing to carry through the year. Our brains have fooled us into thinking that incredible things are just the norm, but Christmas is a time when we have the opportunity to live much more in our hearts and focus on the extraordinary which in actual fact, always surrounds us, even though much of it is invisible. Christmas has the potential to make love so much more visible.
We often forget that we live in a world of beauty and wonder… we take it for granted that the sun and moon rise and set - I mean how does this even happen?! We don’t stop to wonder that the sea draws in and out, one minute turbulent and the next calm; that roses bloom, that we can fly to one place from another in a matter of minutes; that babies are knitted together in our human bodies and are born; that a connection to someone can be so profound it fills the deepest recesses of our heart; that we can send a voice mail to someone a thousand miles away and influence how they feel; that snow falls from the sky in insane patterns, that lightning and rainbows are even a thing; that people arrive just in our hour of need; that things which happened thousands of years ago still have an effect on us now; that people have been to space; that the wind blows… If we really stopped to just think about one of these things, we might feel deeply humbled and in awe to be living in these times.
However Christmas resonates with you, there are stories of the even more impossible… presents arriving miraculously made by elves and delivered by Father Christmas and flying reindeer. An Angel heralding the birth of Jesus, a man who changed the entire structure of the world. Mary who was heavily pregnant having to travel many miles across the edge of a desert which must have seemed impossible for her at times. And let’s not forget how sometimes it seems impossible to fit in seeing all the people or to live with the grief of not being with the person who you so dearly love at Christmas.
The fabric of life is made up of change, struggle and miracle all tightly interwoven, joy and sorrow constantly braided together. Stories and rituals can help us to better embrace this.
We live in very volatile times and difficult things happen en mass and individually and it may feel like we have no agency at times. If we can open our self to the fact that anything is possible then somehow it makes thing softer, gentler and sometimes more hopeful. I no longer make my children promises. This is not to say we live in fear, but I feel it helps us to engage with the fact that we live in mystery with sometimes little external control. When we live with the idea of constant change it helps us to remember that there is light in the dark, dark in the light, beauty in the horror, horror in the beauty, situations are transient and love is literally everywhere ready to anchor us. I have found that this is what gives me power to change my inner landscape a little and that in turn affects the external. And let’s not forget that incredible things outside the norm happen when we have the courage to believe in something seemingly impossible like when my son got through BBC television casting during the most brutal part of his chemo and we suddenly found ourselves with a film crew at our house. Having a spacious mind and a heart which is fully awake to possibility is so needed in this world.
May you carry the gift of the impossible into 2025. Merry Christmas.