Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

– Alvin Toffler

I so love still photography with its power to freeze moments in time.

Ann and I joined with dear friends of ours this past August as their twin sons celebrated their Bar Mitzvahs. It was a beautiful and moving affirmation of their coming of age in their faith tradition.

During the reception, the family shared a wonderful slide show that captured many of the significant – and ordinary – events that had unfolded in the lives of their boys. There they were – infants, toddlers, preschoolers and young adults – their faces looking out from the past.  Frozen in time.

This past weekend, we enjoyed a wonderful dinner with another couple.  As we sat around the table telling stories and reminiscing, one of our friends brought out a thirty year old Polaroid snapshot that had been taken of her standing in the very kitchen she had prepared our meal in. Her youthful face glowing in the camera’s eye. A moment of innocence and beauty held dear.

Photographs capture our most precious moments.  And our silliest, and our happiest,  and our saddest and our most mundane.  They allow us to hold those moments in our minds and hearts. To laugh in the face of time.

But they haunt us too.  They haunt us with the reality of how fleeting it all is. With age.  With loss.  With the reality of impermanence.

Impermanence is a fundamental principal of Buddhist philosophy. But Buddhism has no particular corner on it.

Joan Dideon recounts the year following her husband’s sudden death in her stark yet tender book The Year of Magical Thinking.  On the very first page she says,  “Life changes in an instant. An ordinary instant.”

So true.

This past Saturday, my three year old niece was diagnosed with leukemia.  Life so fragile. Life changed in an ordinary instant.

And beyond the walls of the hospital, life goes on.  Shopping.  Paying bills.  Going to work. Going to school. By necessity life goes on.

In the face of inevitable change, we need continuity.  We seek stability.  We crave the illusion of that which is permanent.

Virgina Woolf in her 1932 New Year’s Eve journal entry writes,

“If one does not lie back and sum up and say to the moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No, stay this moment.  No one ever says that enough.”

Photographer Sam Abell published a beautiful collection of his landscape photographs using, as his title, Woolf’s words:  “Stay This Moment.”

Roscoe Pound says of my profession:  “The law must be stable but it must not stand still.”

That is our bind, isn’t it?  The absolute need for stability.  And the absolute truth of change.

Life must be stable.  But it doesn’t stand still.

As the days of December dwindle to a new year, stay the moment.

It’s December.  And we’re being pulled into the vortex of time.  The maelstrom is all around us! Can you feel it?

Perhaps it’s just me.  But after Halloween, the year just seems to accelerate.  After Thanksgiving, the days move forward at warp speed.  The commitments and the demands and the lists and the expectations and the projects that need to be done – have to get done – before the end of the year seem to mount logarithmically.  And then there are the card lists and the gift lists and the shopping and the holiday parties… .

It’s enough to make one want to jump ship… .

What to do?

Wrong question.

The question is what not to do.

The way out of the vortex – the only way – is the simplest and the hardest thing of all (at least it is for me).   The only way out is to say “no.”

Saying “no” is not news and it’s not rocket science.  All of the leadership and success books tell us that it is fundamental to our sanity and, paradoxically, a key to achieving our goals.

One of the first  articles in this month’s Success Magazine is entitled Actively Do Nothing. “People could improve their mental and physical health as well as their relationships by carving out a portion of their day to do nothing,” the article states.

Jack Canfield in his book The Success Principals recommends creating a “stop-doing”or “don’t do” list.  Ann and I met a woman at the gym a few months ago.  We invited her to one of our Denali slide show presentations.  Her response:  “Thank you.  But I ‘don’t do’ evening commitments.” We were really impressed by that.

So why is saying “no” so hard?  Certainly, we’re conditioned from very early on that “no” is not the right answer.  As time goes on, we also begin to layer on our own assumptions – whether true or not – about what others expect of us.  Sometimes, I suspect, saying “yes” is just a habit.  (I said yes to a commitment recently without even stopping to realize I would be out of the country during the time I had committed!) And for me, there is a healthy dose of narcissistic self-importance that loves to believe that somehow my presence is essential or that I am the only one who can do something.

So as the vortex swirls, I’m working on saying “no” more often.

I’ve started by asking myself whether a project  or an invitation is one that I “should” do or accept rather than one I “want” to do or accept.  I’m working at eliminating the “shoulds.”

Saying no to the non-essential allows us to be more fully present to what is most important.  By doing less, we can pay closer attention to what is essential.  And as The Little Prince reminds us, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  It takes time to see.

The Carmelite monk William McNamara writes,

“We are not really practical, and we shall get nowhere, we shall never find life, life will escape us, unless we learn not to always be bustling about – unless we learn to be still, to let things happen around us, to wait, listen, receive, contemplate.”

“One final word on the subject of time,” McNamara says:

“I suggest that we stop doing half the work that presently consumes us.  Then let us attend to the remaining half wholeheartedly, with contemplative vision and creative love.  I stake the authenticity of our lives and the effectiveness of our work on this radical shift.”

I described the vortex to a friend today as a giant flushing toilet bowl.

Not a great place to end up.

 

 

“Goodbye,” said the fox.  “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret:  It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

“It is the time you have devoted to your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have devoted to my rose –” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox.  “But you must not forget it.”

Achieve nothing.  Kind of like jumbo shrimp.

As I stretched out for my run the other morning, I began to read an article in the Buddhist publication Tricycle on the spiritual pitfalls of multi-tasking.

Tricycle is an excellent quarterly filled with wonderful writings from wise thinkers on such topics as “nothingness” and “meditation” and “enlightenment.”

Turning to stretch my other leg, I noticed that this month’s issue of Success magazine was also sitting on the counter.

I love Success.  It’s stuffed with dynamic articles on “business” and “leadership” and “wealth” from leaders and teachers like Wayne Dyer and Jack Canfield and John Maxwell. Like Tricycle, it’s one of the few publications that I read from cover to cover every month.

Strange combination of magazines, isn’t it?

When I look in my library, I see a similar cacophony:  a significant collection of books on theology and on Eastern thought; an equally impressive mix of business-related titles written by the likes of Richard Branson, Malcolm Gladwell and Donald Trump.

Weird.

Maybe.

As Westerners, we are programed for success.  Here in the Northeast, we might even say that we are driven for success. And yet, as fellow journeyers along the path, we search to understand the ultimate as well.

The question is: How do we strive to achieve our goals and at the same time stay true to our hearts?  How do we pay the bills and accumulate the resources to have the freedom we want and not lose sight of what is truly important? How do we achieve and still stay sane?

Finding the balance is the key, I guess. Although that sounds so trite.  And seems next to impossible. Not to mention the fact that “finding” seems to require the “achievement” of something.

For many of us, it is important to have goals.  It is necessary to have money. We need to meet our responsibilities.  We want to be able to enjoy the opportunities that life presents to us.

And yet, at the end of the day, the guy with the most toys doesn’t win.

Darren Hardy, publisher of Success, tells the story of visiting a family friend who had accumulated a “staggering fortune”  who now lay dying from cancer.  As Hardy was leaving, the man called him back to the beside and grabbed his arm. “Don’t miss the point like I did,” he told Hardy.  “I wish I’d spent as much time and energy accumulating relationships as I had houses.  I wish I had invested my heart as aggressively as I did my money.  Only now do I understand true wealth, and none of it appears on a balance sheet.”

When I first started in law practice, the standard to achieve was 1800 billable hours a year. For young professionals starting out today, it is not unusual to hear of expectations of 2000 billable hours and more.

And yet at the end of the path, no one is going to wish they had billed more time.

Achieving.  And not achieving.  Being.

Jack Kornfield writes, “What matters most is how we live.  This is why it is so difficult and so important to ask this question of ourselves: ‘Am I living my path fully, do I live without regret?’ so that we can say on whatever day is the end of our life, “Yes, I have lived my path with heart.”

“The quality of your action depends on the quality of your being,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh. He says,

“Look at the tree in the front yard.  The tree doesn’t seem to be doing anything.  It stands there vigorous, fresh and beautiful, and everyone profits from it.  That’s the miracle of being.  If a tree were less than a tree, all of us would be in trouble.  But if a tree is just a real tree, then there’s hope and joy.  That’s why if you can be yourself, that is already action.  Action is based on non-action; action is being.”

Oh, by the way,  while running on the elliptical, I finished that article in the Buddhist review on the spiritual dangers of multi-tasking.  Achieving nothing.

We are what we think.

All that we are arises

With our thoughts.

With our thoughts, we make our world.

– The Buddha

I climb mountains to gain perspective.

But how easy it is to lose it.

“Can’t see the forest for the trees,” the old adage goes.  How true that is.

When we’re in the thick of it, it’s difficult to see the big picture.  And even when we think we see the big picture, often times we don’t.

The frame we put around the picture determines how we see it – for good or for bad.

I spend a fair amount of time before a photography exhibit thinking about how to present the pieces, how to frame them.  The frame matters.  The frame guides the viewer’s eye.  It sets boundaries.

Nature and wildlife photographer James Balog has a fascinating series of primate portraits.  Many of these photographs appear to be “posed”  in what looks to be a studio setting.  The camera’s perspective is pulled back just far enough to see studio backdrops and lighting equipment.

These photographs challenge the viewer to think not only about the genre of wildlife photography but also about more fundamental concepts like our relationship to the “wild.”  Balog’s change in “frame” is  disturbing.  It compels the viewer to think.  It stretches perspective.

Most photographs that we see – and many that we take – are snapped from the places in which we find ourselves standing.  When I teach an introductory photography workshop, I encourage my students to make their photographs from different levels:  laying on the ground, standing on a chair, sitting in a tree.   I assign projects that require the use of different lenses, varying apertures and a range of shutter speeds.  I ask them to think in black and in color. All with the hope of expanding the way they see.

Would that we could be so flexible in everything that we do!

My propensity is to lock onto a particular way of seeing something.  My view of the situation becomes the view.  Tunnel vision takes over.  And I lose perspective.

I think about the old figure-ground studies that appeared in many of our high school or college texts:  Is this picture of an old woman or a beautiful young one?  It depends on how one sees.

Is the glass half-empty?  Or is it half-full?

Tony Robbins uses the illustration of footsteps.  By themselves, footsteps mean nothing.  But place a context around them, and they take on meaning:  the footsteps in an alleyway when you are alone on a city street have a completely different meaning from the footsteps of a child coming down the stairs for breakfast.

Jack Canfield tells the story of standing in a line behind a man who was upbraiding a hotel clerk. Apparently the clerk had been unable to accommodate the man’s request for a larger room.  The man went away extraordinarily angry.  When Canfield’s turn came at the desk, he complimented the clerk on the kind and patient way in which the clerk had handled an unpleasant customer.  The clerk responded, “The man probably was just having a bad day.  He’s probably a very nice person.”

How we frame situations – and people – impacts how we move in the world and how we interact with others. Agility in how we frame allows us to be flexible, creative and gracious.

Whether in perception, or how we relate with the world, or how we present our art: the frame matters.

Take in the view.