The Bamboo Tree

One day a man planted a bamboo seedling. He cared for it and each day he watered it and tended to it, making sure it had the proper sunlight to grow. After a year's time, the man saw that the plant had not grown at all, but he continued to water it, tend to it, and make sure it was nourished by proper sunlight. 

Again, after the second year the plant had not grown. He watered and tended it through the third year and the fourth. Suddenly, as if by magic, in the fifth it began growing. In fact, it grew two and a half feet a day until in six weeks it was ninety feet tall.

The bamboo tree's growth is not magic. During its first five years, when it seems nothing is happening, it develops miles and miles of roots beneath the ground. Though no growth is visible, the foundation is being established and strengthened.

The lesson is that there are times where we feel our lives are stagnating, or nothing is changing or no dramatic events are happening.  In reality, those are the days we are building our own roots and growing strong for the days when growth hits us in spurts.  This way our lives remain balanced. 

We Must Do....

I gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which I must stop and look fear in the face...I say to myself, I've lived through this and can take the next thing that comes along...
We must do the things we think we cannot do.

~Eleanor Roosevelt

Lightly

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly.
Learn to do everything lightly…
Even though you’re feeling deeply…
Lightly let things happen
and lightly cope with them…
On tiptoes and with no luggage...
Completely unencumbered. 

~Aldous  Huxley

The Strength Of Surrender

Once there was a woman who spent her whole life climbing a very high mountain. She began as a child, and she could not remember a time before the mountain.

Year after year she would ascend the steep cliffs, and in the process she became very good at the motion of climbing. The muscles in her legs and her back grew very strong, and after a while, climbing felt as natural to her as breathing.

As time passed, and she went higher and higher, she didn't even have to try and climb anymore - her body did it automatically. At last, one day, the woman reached the top of the mountain. She was overjoyed with her achievement, and couldn't wait to start out on the next portion of her travels, and to conquer her next
mountain.

As she looked over the horizon, she saw a beautiful blue lake, stretching sideways as far as her eye could see. But being a climber all her life, the woman had only lived on the mountains, so she had never seen a lake, and if fact, did not even know what a lake was.

She watched the strange expanse before her and concluded that it must be some unusual kind of blue mountain. Since the only way to continue her journey was to cross the odd-looking blue form, she decided she had to "climb the lake". So the mountain woman walked up to the water, and began to try to "climb the lake" with the same motions she'd used to climb the mountain. At first she could not understand why she was not making any progress, and, in fact, was exhausting herself.  She mustered all the energy in her body and tried to "climb" even harder, placing one leg in front of the other, using her hands to try to grasp the "blue rocks". But her efforts were useless. She kept falling over, and wasn't going anywhere.

Just about this time, when the mountain woman felt like giving up, she noticed a person floating on top of the blue lake, gently gliding his body through the water with the slightest movement of his arms and legs. "What are you doing my friend?" he called out to her.  "What does it look like?" she answered, her face flush with embarrassment. "I'm climbing the lake".

"Good woman," the man of the lake replied, "don't you know that you can't cross a lake by climbing it? The only way to travel through water is to swim".

"But I am such a marvelous climber!" the mountain woman insisted. "I've spent my whole life learning to climb. I can climb any mountain. I can reach the top of any peak. Surely there is some way I can climb the lake."

"I'm sure you are an excellent climber," the man of the lake answered politely. "But that skill won't help you here in the water. It took one kind of wisdom to get you to the top of the mountain - you had to make your power stronger than the mountain. Now you need to learn another kind of wisdom to get across the lake - you need to surrender to the power of the water and allow its force to be stronger than you. You don't have to try hard anymore. In fact, the less you try the better you will do!"

And so it was that the man of the lake taught the woman of the mountain how to swim. At first, she splashed and thrashed around in the water, for she was accustomed to using her very strong energy in her climbing. But her teacher was very patient, and she learned how to float on the water's surface, and allow the waves and wind to carry her gently forward until she was hardly doing anything at all.

And that's how the mountain woman learned that the strength of surrender is just as powerful as the strength of pushing forward.

Strength And Confidence

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within.  It is there all the time.

~Anna Freud

Hold On or Let Go

Some think its holding on that makes one strong; sometimes it't letting go.

~Sylvia Robinson

Callahan's Attitude Control

In 1982 Steven Callahan was crossing the Atlantic alone in his sailboat when it struck something and sank. He was out of the shipping lanes and floating alone in an inflatable life raft. He didn’t have many supplies left and his chances at survival were dwindling.  But when three fishermen found him seventy-six days later (the longest anyone has survived a shipwreck on a life raft alone), he was alive – granted he was skinnier than he was when he started, but alive.


He kept himself going when all hope seemed lost, when there seemed no point in continuing the struggle. He was starved, dehydrated and thoroughly exhausted. Giving up would have seemed the only sane option. But he didn’t.  In his book, Adrift, this is what he wrote: "I tell myself I can handle it. Compared to what others have been through, I'm fortunate. I tell myself these things over and over, building up fortitude..."

Wow – talk about attitude control!

The lesson here is that no matter how bad our circumstances others have been through much worse. It may be hard to do, but if we stop and realize how lucky we are and what we do have, it keeps us sane-even in the midst of crisis. So whatever you're going through, tell yourself you can handle it. Tell it to yourself over and over; use positive affirmations about your situation. It will help you get through the rough spots with a little more strength and peace.He had only three pounds of food and eight pints of water, a solar still and a makeshift spear.  When his raft sprung a leak, he was able to keep it afloat and fix the leak, pumping up the raft continually for 33 more days until his rescue. During his two-plus months at sea, Callahan traveled approximately 1,800 miles and survived shark attacks.

The Butterfly

One day a child found a cocoon of a butterfly. He watched it each day until finally a small opening appeared.   Fascinated by what was about to happen, the boy sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It looked like it had gone as as far as it could go.

The boy decided to help the butterfly, so he ran home and got a pair of scissors, ran back and carefully snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

The boy continued to watch the butterfly with anticipation.  He expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, and that the body would contract to its normal size. But neither of those things happened! Instead, the the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It was never able to fly.

In his haste to help the butterfly, what the boy didn't understand was how natured worked.  The restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were nature's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it was free from the cocoon.

The lesson for us is that sometimes, struggles are what we need in life to help us grow. If we went through life wihtout obstacles, we would not be as strong as what we could have been.

And we could never fly...