The Coyote Exchange

“”All who wander are not lost.” 

-J.R.R. Tolkien

It’s hard to wonder for some.  It’s harder to wander for some.

It’s hard to understand why bad things happen to good people.  Why we’ve lost our job, torn ligaments in our knees, lost our legs, didn’t get the job, didn’t get pregnant, you get it.

And it’s interesting to watch how people react to things that represent ‘despair or at least insecurity or loss’ – ‘ and watch how they react.  I can only ever speak from my experience, and I’ve had plenty of ‘wondering’ and subsequent ‘wandering’ opportunities in my life to reflect on.

Here’s all I know for certain, there are lessons in all of it, every bit of it, but we run to ‘fix’ it so fast sometimes that we don’t stop to investigate how we got there before we try to get ‘into’ something else.  One of my greeting cards states, “The first step on the way out is to see how we got there.” 

In The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, he states, …”but tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no signficance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present, that you live.” 

So is there wisdom in insecurity?  Is there really any reason to embrace a time of wandering, not sure of where you’re going, walking aimlessly on the beach or driving aimlessly without a map?  I think there is and I’m supported by Philip Wheelwright in Arts and Letters who artfully suggests;  

“The wisdom of insecurity is not a way of evasion, but a carrying on, however, without imagining that the burden of the world, or even the next moment, is ours…it is a philosophy of the present – always remembering that to be of the present, is to be, and candidly know ourselves to be, on the crest of a breaking wave.”

Filed under: Uncategorized on July 26th, 2009