Life Is About Seasons and Cycles| Daily Meditation-October 25, 2021

Today’s Quotation:

I love best to have each thing in its season, doing without it at all other times.  I have never gotten over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too.

Henry David Thoreau

Today’s Meditation:

I often marvel at how intolerant we often are of not having things at certain times.  Marketers constantly try to reinforce this idea in our minds–we have to have something, and we have to have it now.  I remember an ad campaign for Kellogg’s Corn Pops, a series of commercials in which kids find out that they’re out of Corn Pops and basically freak out, repeating over and over “Gotta have my Pops.”  What a horrible model of intolerance and unwillingness to compromise!

One of my favorite things in the world is pumpkin pie.  When I think about it, I easily could make them all year long, but for some reason, they taste much better in the fall.  We may have one or two in the winter, too, but for the most part the pumpkin pie has its season.

If we try to have something all the time, it loses its newness and its specialness.  Life is about seasons and cycles and moving from one thing to another, and much of our discontent arises from not recognizing this fact.  When something goes away, we often think we’ve lost it for good, and we mourn that loss or feel a great deal of frustration, rather than seeing the new opportunities that have come into our lives.

Allowing things to be part of our lives for their seasons makes them much more special and much more enjoyable, for we know that they’ll be gone soon, and we’ll get all we can from them while we have them.  Life is what it is, and we can’t have it all, all the time.  Let’s enjoy what we have while we have it, then bid it a fond farewell when it leaves us, either for a time or for good.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Why might we try to hang on to things for so long?

2.  What happens when we continually hold on to things we like?  Do we leave room for new things that we might like to enter our lives?

3.  How can we practice “letting things go” when their seasons pass?

For further thought:

For everything there is a time and a season.
There is a time to be born and time to die.
There is a time to laugh and a time to cry.
There is a time to make new friends and
a time to renew old acquaintances.
There is a time to pray and a time to labor for the Lord.
There is a time to speak and a time to remain silent.
There is a time to stand fast and a time to yield.
There is a time of darkness and a time of light.
There is a time of sadness and a time of joy.
There is a time of defeat and a time of victory.
There is a time of suffering and a time to be uplifted.
There is a time of death and a time to be resurrected.

from the book of Ecclesiastes

Credit: Living Life Fully