By Klaus Döring
Sometimes, we feel our life is turning miserably. Our negativity doesn’t allow us to keep our eyes, ears and, most importantly, our minds, hearts and souls opened. We’re reaching our breaking point.
As I said several months ago here: this breaking point can be the prelude to our strongest moment. It is when we reach our breaking point, that we discover our real strength. Allow me to ask you, my dear readers, “What happens to you or with you when you reach your breaking point?” Do you face it, or do you run away?
I’ll be giving you a very simple answer: If you face it, you break it. If you run away (and/or close your ears, eyes, and mouth) – it surely breaks you!
Every day, a dull reality! Many of us will answer this question with a big YES! Actually, we do like to cover a newborn’s day already with a grey veil. Each day has a new face, but sometimes we don’t have the strength to watch its countenance. Of course, not every day has adventures and highlights.
But we enjoy quarreling and arguing. With other people and even with ourselves.
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that, at the same time, seemed especially desolating and painful with a particular satisfaction. Indeed, everything I have learned, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness.
If it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from your earthly existence, the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal and trivial to be endurable.
By observation, we can feel that many of us need help to manage our everyday life. We need something that would keep us going as we journey through life. Many times, we can also learn from other people and their experiences.
Blue eyed or very philosophical but so very true: If the world is to be brought to order, a nation must be first changed. If the nation isn’t changed, my hometown is to be reordered and must first be set right, my dear brothers and sisters. And one step further: If my family is to be regenerated, I MYSELF MUST FIRST BE!
And here is one more thing: Affection is the humblest love – it gives itself no airs. It lives with humble and private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, and the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor. The glory of affection, the disposition of mind, the good will and tender attachment, is that it can unite those who are not “made for one and another,” people. Who, if not out down by fate in the same household or community, would have nothing to do with one and another.
For me life has been a thing of ups and downs in approximately equal measure. I don’t have something sensational to report every day about my progress. Often, I wonder if fulfillment in life is necessarily tied to change for the better.
+++
You can email me: doringklaus@gmail.com or follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter or visit one of my websites www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com.
