'Suddenly, I am ten-year-old again, joyfully flying my kite in the Light of a gorgeous spring sky, with Wordless Knowing.' Photo: by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash
Through the ages: Daniel Clarke Flynn is still practising
‘Vision is a lot more than just seeing.’
One sometimes hears that ‘Youth is wasted on the young’. It is not.
In the eighty-eighth – and last – year of her life, in a poem called ‘Wordless Knowing’ (26 October, 2018), Joyce Gee suggests that we carry our youthful amazement within us all our life. It simply gets buried under our adult concerns. We go from a sense of ‘I am’ – a small evolving part of Creation well beyond our youthful comprehension – to the adult challenge of ‘Who am I?’, detached from early amazement. If fortunate, we return to the Wordless Knowing of our youth, to an interconnectedness with all of Creation.
We have been created with the capacity to wake up, show up, and be present to the moment. We are able to be silent and still, listen and observe, without judgment. We can learn and reflect before choosing and taking action.
One spiritual program I practice suggests that we seek progress, not perfection. We are not saints. We never ‘arrive’. I’m glad churches do not name people ‘saints’ until they are dead. It would be an awful responsibility to carry if one was named such during one’s lifetime.
Sports conditioners say that we hit our athletic peak at around thirty. After that we can only maintain it, perhaps fine-tune it, but thereafter we cannot improve our raw physical ability. Yet our vision and perspective increases with time, if we practice life-long learning.
Vision is a lot more than just seeing. It requires humility and openness. Advices & queries suggests that what we believe to be true in our lives is changed when we listen to and observe others in stillness, without judgment.
I have come to believe that while each of us is born in a specific family, time, and place, we are each called to grow beyond our beginnings – called to practice the three human capabilities that distinguish us from the rest of Creation: our ability to observe and listen without judgment or reaction; our ability to experience ‘intuitions’; and our ability to then choose positive intuitions, while acknowledging and leaving negative ones to expire. All this was advised by the ancient Roman and Athenian Stoics centuries ago, as well as by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. This was written after he survived a concentration camp. ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’
When I practice these three abilities, I play a part in Creation rather than in Destruction. I create a better world for myself and others. We are like butterflies flapping our wings in a forest. Our tiny choices set off an invisible wave that can lead to results far beyond our imagination.
It is through slow, steady, relaxed, repetitive practice – choosing a positive attitude, acknowledging yet rejecting the negative – that I find a peace that surpasses understanding. As age-old wisdom says, the heart has reasons that reason does not understand. Suddenly, I am ten-year-old again, joyfully flying my kite in the Light of a gorgeous spring sky, with Wordless Knowing.
Daniel is from Belgium & Luxembourg Yearly Meeting.
