WordUp by Chad Gramling

(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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I find it pretty amazing how things in life often converge into one big stew. Stew is the perfect metaphor because a good stew uses like ingredients (most often vegetables) but not the same ingredients. So you throw potatoes, carrots, celery (maybe mushrooms and onions) into a pot and let it . . . well, stew. Of course, it centers around the stock. Perhaps you like beef but pork makes a good stew stock too if you didn’t know.

I say this because yesterday, without knowing it, I had been boiling a big pot of “life stew” and it finally was ready to be taken off the burner. So I poured a bowl and it tasted wonderful.

I recently finished reading a book called “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle (that’s one book off my goal of 20 by the end of 2008 by the way). While I don’t necessarily agree with all the spiritual concepts within the tome, Tolle wonderfully expresses the way in which people will literally corrupt their life and prevent true happiness by either agonizing over the past or fretting over the future. In doing so, they grip to history or worry about the future so desperately that they never really are present in the now – which is all that really matters.

About the same time I started reading that book, I had a couple old friends I hadn’t heard from in like ten years or more request me as a friend on MySpace. It’s absolutely wonderful that they chose to reconnect with me. But I also felt a bit melancholy over those occurrences because I began to think about the many friends I have had in life. Many of them had been like family to me and I still consider them as family to this day.

But I no longer know them.

Some of those folks I’ve known provided me with the greatest of joys, some of them the deepest of sorrows. Some of those friends are no longer of this earth and I never was able to say goodbye. Some of those friends I’ll never see again. This stuff makes me think about biological family members I have lost. I’ve dwelled on the fact that I have only one parental link left in my life. All grandparents and my father have gone home. I am reaching a point in life where I will be the blossom atop the tree as I watch the roots I establish below.

I could take satisfaction in my personal believe . . . that those roots are on more stable ground and more firmly planted in sanity than the place where I was sown. But the truth is, I don’t know that. I know it to be fact now . . .but I don’t know that will be the case five or ten years from now. I don’t even know that will be the case an hour from now.

I sat at Christmas dinner with my family this year. I mentioned the fact that Jenny and I worried we had purchased a table that would be too big for our needs when we chose it. But on that day, we were pressed for room. It donned on me that – at that moment – we were wonderfully blessed to be a unified family and not scattered about the country or distant from one another.

As you can see, my mind has been brewing a wicked stew during the last couple weeks. I’ve thought a lot about the past and a lot about the future and have tried to refocus my intentions on experiencing and enjoying the NOW.

My stew hit its boiling point yesterday as I drove home from work. I was thinking about the unlikely request for MySpace “friendship” from someone out of the blue that I hadn’t heard from in ten to fifteen years. It was a strange realization to know that since I had last spoken to that person, I had graduated high school, received two degrees, married, had two children, a career and achieved one lifelong dream of being a published author. It was strange to know that there are people I’ve known for much less time that know me a hundred times better than that person.

I was thinking about this and wondering why I was thinking about it. Then life converged. The radio station I was listening to played a song that was very popular at the time I knew the person I was thinking about at that very moment!

I laughed because I always do that when my stew starts to boil over. Some people call them “Eureka Moments.” That’s when I realized it was time to take Tolle’s advice:

Allow the past to die the moment it happens because now is the only time that matters.

I turned up the radio and decided I would reflect on the past through the duration and once the song was over, the past would then be dead.

I’ve never tasted a stew that was so delicious!

[tags]life, history, Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, friendship, music, emotions, MySpace, stew[/tags]