Forty-three

Chaos and clarity merge to unity, at now, when all is clear then and when are without meaning.

I remember as kids we used to lay in the grass on warm summer days and watch the clouds pass overhead. We would pick out shapes that appeared in the cloud formations and watch as they were transformed by the wind and heat of the sun into other recognizable objects. There was no sense that the continual metamorphosis was in any way other than natural and as one set of clouds passed from view we would move on to the next finding new things to ooh and aah over. Childhood (and I mean pre-teen childhood) was a time when there wasn't much past to clutter up my mind carried around like so much baggage, and the future was some far off thing that would arrive some day but not in my lifetime. It was a time of both newly found self-awareness and a realization that now was all that mattered. It wasn't until I grew much older that the weight of years behind me began to grow heavy and the shortness of years before me became readily apparent.

Coping with change as a child was easy. While settled in the present change didn't feel like change because there wasn't a reference of continuity to measure newness against. The present was a series of unconnected unique encounters called life.

I find that my students often have trouble when a technique they have been doing one way for years is all of a sudden different in some way. To them the change seems sudden while to me it's a result of continual refinement over a long period of time. I could point this out to them, and often do, but the message seems to get lost somewhere along the way and I observe much consternation as they struggle to incorporate the new idea into their practice. With the passage of time I notice that the revised technique starts showing up with more regularity.