Meditation on Forgiving Reality to Celebrate Life

Something I’ve noticed in recent years as a parent and child is some form of the following recurring joke: We’ll be paying for her counseling because of that thing we just did when she grows up.  While the humor is a tad dark, it’s also funny and true.  Here’s the thing though, all our parents “wronged” us in various ways and I think everybody would benefit from therapy.  Part of what it means to be human and a key component of life is it’s a mixture of light AND dark, there’s both amazingness AND suck, things are beautiful AND broken.  To put it bluntly, that’s the way things are and there’s not much we can do about it.

That said, YOU, beautiful friend, DO get to decide what you MAKE of it.  This is where something Richard Rohr wrote blew my mind and inspired me to share this with you: Forgive reality so you can celebrate life.  Forgive your parents’ shortcomings, the hurricanes in nature, the storms in politics, the disasters in our lives, the wrongs bosses or friends have done you, and YOURSELF.  You’re not perfect, none of us are, and neither is life or the world.  Let that be okay.  Scratch that, let the imperfection of you and I and reality be more than okay, name it SUBLIME.

This isn’t to say we accept harm, leave the world the way it is, or stay stuck in unhelpful patterns of living.  Instead, today I invite you to embrace reality as it is and forgive it for being a mixed bag, which frees you to celebrate life in its totality and people in our perfect imperfections, and THEN, from this space of peace and love change what needs changing.