A Return to Normalcy (June 2021 Newsletter)
Thank you for continuing to support YWB. We deeply appreciate our monthly sustaining members, our Patreon subscribers, and all of our students who have supported us during this time in whatever way.
What is the ‘normal’ that’s almost here again? Statistically represented in a bell-shaped curve, it is the center of the hump where most of us would be at any given time. What is that? Where is that?
Normalcy for most of us is socializing and getting back to the things we enjoy and look forward to most in life.
Let’s not forget the lessons we’ve learned through this forced isolation. We are totally capable of living a semi-solitary life. We should recognize that there is no normal. We’ve learned that there are alternatives for doing anything such as buying and selling, communicating, working and entertaining. We’ve learned that both too much togetherness and too long a separation can be torturous, and that sickness and sometimes death comes swiftly and may sweep one off the face of the earth going from health to death in a breathtakingly short interval.
As our lives return to pre-pandemic normal, all the stress of too much to do and not enough time will certainly haunt us again. Our expectations are so high for the return of those grand old times. But were those days so perfect? Here are some simple things you need to do all the time: Stay calm and in the moment. Stay mindful of each moment instead letting your enthusiasm for the newfound freedom become an uncontrolled spinning of the wheel caught in a rut; enjoy at a steady pace; try something new and different this time around. You are not the same individual returning to the same normalcy. You are a new individual returning to a new phase in life.
“In the infinite consciousness universes come and go like particles of dust in a beam of sunlight that shines through a hole in the roof,” the sage Vashishtha in one of the great texts of the Vedanta reminds us. It is never the same. You are not the same. You are better than you were. Don’t lose the clean, polished soul that is you! Your light shines. Spread it wherever you go.
Namaste,
sipra