Frank Ostaseski, Founder & Director Metta Institute, Five Precepts
The Third Precept: Don’t Wait
Patience is different than waiting. When we wait, we are full of expectations. When we’re waiting, we miss what this moment has to offer. Worrying or strategizing about what the future holds for us, we miss the opportunities that are right in front of us. Waiting for the moment of death, we miss so many moments of living. Don’t wait. If there’s someone you love, tell him or her that you love them. Allow the precarious nature of this life to show you what’s most important, then enter fully.
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Why is the story I am telling in my head about what the future is going to be like so fascinating? It’s often just the same old fantasies I’ve had a thousand times before, and yet it can distract me so thoroughly from what is really here. To be fully here requires attentiveness and practice. If we have the discipline to let go of the fantasies and memories that arise, we have the privilege of seeing what is really here. As long as I am waiting for some fictional future event to change my life, I am not yet fully alive.
As St. Augustine prayed, “In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you, God, are before all things past and transcend all things future.” Loving God, help me to stop waiting for the future to be with you. Help me to bring myself fully into the present to be with you in full aliveness.
THIS READING REMINDED ME SO MUCH OF A POEM THAT MY HUSBAND RECENTLY SENT ME:
The Place I Want To Get Back To
by Mary Oliver
is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness
and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me
they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let's see who she is
and why she is sitting
on the ground like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;
and so they came
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way
I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward
and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring to me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years
I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can't be repeated.
If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.
"The Place I Want To Get Back To" by Mary Oliver, from Thirst. © Beacon Press, 2006.
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