I’ve spent the last several days contemplating on change. Change, flow, balance of things, interconnectedness and synchronicity: how from a moment to the other everything seems to be in movement, how I feel to be connected, to be in flow, receiving the gift or blessing of numerous synchronicity: however for an incredibly long time it seemed all things have frozen, and nothing moved, like in a super long winter.

But there is life, even during winter, even during an icy-cold, snowy winter, hidden, under the hardness of permafrost ground, hidden in the seeds which are waiting for the spring. In the seemingly frozen quietude tiny little things like soft water streams have craved big mountains and moved things around. I did my job. I did many things, which didn’t seem to have a result… I felt like I was pouring cups of water in the desert day by day wanting to create a pond.

I knew spring would never come until it’s time. Such is the case with changes. And changes can be twofold: one is unavoidable, like growing older, or loosing a job; the other is the desired one, when we want to be somewhere in the future, already accomplished, thin, perfect…

I understood a secret – or rather I got initiated into the depths of a secret, which is wide open for everyone but even being this open and accessible it doesn’t make easier to get there. Arriving in a present moment where I didn’t oppose, neither desired a change, arriving home to full acceptance, acknowledgement, honour and gratitude, as imperfect and patched as it is, I unlocked my being and change happened on its own, like a flower breaking to bloom. Maybe blossoming is accepting the present moment as it is, in its pure, harsh nudity, when time has come, and this alone is a sacred pass-key which can turn things upside down. It’s like giving up the fight. Surrendering. It’s like a dimension-leap, or leap of faith, the one that Kiergkegaard describes in his book of Fear and Trembling. I often did interpret the absurd leap of the Knight of Faith outside of its religious connotation, as I believed that it fits to everyone who has lost things in his/her life, and from this loss the only way out is to move closer to the root of such damage. I borrow the description from SparkNote which I find quite good:

“The knight of faith is not at all distinguished in appearance, since he exists, like the aesthetic hero, as a single individual and delights in the finitude of this world. Still, the knight of faith has undergone the double movement of infinite resignation and the leap of faith into the absurd by which the knight regains everything he has lost. He can delight in the finitude of this world as someone who has learned to appreciate it through loss.”

Change is all about loosing something – and gaining something else. A zen-meditation or Buddhist approach of life is to try to find, try to touch that within ourselves (or outside, but that’s impossible because of the nature of matter), what is not changing.

With all this introduction, I bring you today another quote from my book, addressing change (surprise, surprise), as an encouragement or invitation for you to ponder over changes in your life.

“Here’s something I may not have mentioned yet, but it’s so important I cannot highlight it enough. This is it: change can happen only in our own rhythm and only when we are ready for it. Therefore we do need patience and humility (acceptance). Otherwise we won’t dilate and slack in the necessary rhythm (and this is so important when giving birth, for example). But from muscle power we can be neither patient, nor humble. It’s an equation full of unknown parts. Moreover, it is not only that change mostly and many times depends on us [Bela Hamvas, in: Letters (Levelek), p.288, Medio Publishing House, Budapest], but with our impatience we may pull back its silent, hidden work which goes deep down to our base. Impatience is one of our most unpleasant companions and no one can avoid it, and for most of us this stuff is quite hard to deal with. Imagine hastening a birth of a baby. This is exactly what Hamvas (Bela; Hungarian philosopher) states as main difference between the western and eastern cultures: people from the west are impatient, they want everything right away but they are superficial and incapable to reach the roots of existence, they have no patience to wait for the spring and let the grass grow from the sowed seeds or let the bread bake well enough. But „ (…) Who wants to shorten the destined time at a certain station of the fate, necessarily summons multiples difficulties of this specific station upon himself. On each station we ought to stay for a fixed periods of time and no one can shorten this period with impunity.” [“… It’s not urgency which sets the conditions of change but the maturity of the subject.” In: Béla Hamvas: Letters (Levelek) p.226]. It can help a lot if we keep this in mind.”