A rainy Saturday morning.

Here I sit, enjoying the sound  of the rain and the cool in the air and enjoying the peace of 530 AM on a Saturday morning.  Autumn is definitely starting to assert its presence now and I am, as always, enjoying the change of seasons.  It's that natural rhythm of life, summer gives way to autumn gives way to winter gives way to spring gives way to summer again.  It's a constant, it flows, and it defines our lives, like the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the stars in the sky as the constellations wheel and change over the year as we travel round the sun, and the motions of the planets.  If we take the time to be mindful, and to look outside of ourselves and observe, we see these rhythms all about us.

It leads me on other thoughts of course.  There are indeed rhythms and cycles in everything, we are born, we grow, we die.  It's nothing to be afraid of, it's just life.  Along the way we meet other people all following their paths and living the cycle of their lives.  We may not know all the people on this earth, we may know a thousand, or a hundred, or even ten, but those we meet touch us all and leave their mark on us in some way.  Some of them we may meet only once or twice, some we may walk beside for a lifetime, some we may be friends with for years and either suddenly or gradually drift apart, wondering if we really knew this person at all, a place I suddenly find myself in.

The truth of it is to me that people go through life and there is this constant subtle energy that urges us to grow and evolve, whether we are only here for this life or if we have many incarnations to live.  If we resist the energy of change we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being left behind, withering on the vine and stagnating and dying, and wondering why we are being left behind by all the people who we used to know.  Most people cannot stay in the same place, they have to grow, have to change, do all the things that they do, marriage, family, a house in the suburbs, work.  Having said that we must grow spiritually and emotionally too.  To sit still for too long is to risk decay and stagnation, of being a teenager in the body of a 50 or 60 year old, too afraid to face the challenges that life presents and so clinging to the tattered vestiges of adolescence, like a child who grew up near me who kept his security blanket until it was a tiny rag that fit in his fist and far past useful for anything.  In the end people, whether friends or couples or colleagues, can either grow and grow together, or they can grow apart, and such separations, while painful, are often necessary, especially when you hold to the view that I do, that when we are so immune to the more subtle messages that the universe sends, that it will have to send along painful events to get us to sit up and listen and consider our path through life, and to shock us out of our apathy.