james_

We are all refugees from the past, because history is like a country. A broken, nuked state that no longer issues visas and has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. There is no way back to that place, although a great many of us expend huge amounts of effort trying to return. The past is an exclusion zone, an empty wasteland - everything that there ever was in the past now exists outside of it or not at all.

Realistically, there are only two courses of action. You can spend your whole life trying to go back, kick and scream to no avail or you can make a new home in the place that you have fled to. I have finally come to understand this after a year of being paralysed by my desperate need to get back the life I once had. I thought that I was adhering to the philosophy of wei wu wei: "action through inaction" but in reality I was swimming upstream, and only ever staying where I was. True inaction is to allow the stream to carry you, take the course of least resistance, and resist the temptation to swim ahead (there may be dangerous rapids - best to have a fair warning)

It is surely best to be like the water itself, be a part of the river, not a swimmer. Recognise that life is not an activity, it is a process: Life is not something you do, it is something you are. Observe the way and align yourself with it, in this manner all doing becomes effortless.

All pain, all suffering is transitory, like rocks in the stream. The river flows around them, experiences them but does not make them a part of itself. They are on the path, but are not the path. I will no longer let those things trouble me, for like the rocks in the stream they have passed by. They exist now only as memories of another place.