Seeds in the Black Earth-Daily Meditation 2.27.23

Today’s quotation:

If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of the human become in its long journey toward the stars?-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Today’s Meditation:

Sometimes I feel like a seed in the earth–buried under the ground, unable to see the sunlight or the stars or feel the breeze and the sunshine.  But what does that seed do?  It grows and becomes something else that emerges from the darkness to dwell in the sunshine and the breezes.  The seed doesn’t despair because it doesn’t think–it just does what it does.  We, on the other hand, tend to overthink our situations. We often lose hope because of this tendency, making ourselves feel miserable because we can’t see the sunshine and starlight in our future if we keep on keeping on, allowing ourselves to grow and develop and become something more tomorrow than tomorrow we are today.

One of the most essential life rules I’ve learned is that things outside ourselves shouldn’t “give us” hope–hope comes from inside, and it’s a natural part of who we are.  Sometimes, the tank runs nearly empty.  Then we see, hear, or experience something that makes us feel hope once more, but that feeling has been inside us, being pushed down and repressed by things like fear and ego and depression and anxiety.  We need to access our hope much more often to make it more robust; it becomes an essential part of our everyday lives.

Sometimes, we get too caught up in our hopes based on incomplete information.  We may hope for a particular job (or relationship) and not get it, not realizing that the other job we get may be more critical for us as a learning experience, even while we still hope for the dream job.  I’ve learned, though, that we may find that dream job in the job that we thought we didn’t want–if we allow ourselves to be open to the experience and make ourselves do our absolute best at the job.  Our hopes weren’t dashed when we didn’t get the other job–we learned that, very often, they’re misplaced.

Rather than hoping for something specific, I hope for a better me.  Rather than hoping for things to turn out how I think they should, I hope they’ll turn out in ways that are best for everyone.  Change is a constant in life, and let’s hope that the changes we face help us learn and grow rather than hoping they turn out how we think they should.

Questions to consider:

Why do we tend to hope for things to be specific ways?

Why is it so easy for us to start feeling hopeless sometimes?

When we feel hopeless, what are some specific strategies for accessing the hope inside of ourselves?

For further thought:

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.-Vaclav Havel

If you missed our last Daily Meditation, it is right here.