While I was surfing through YouTube this week, I was struck with a sense of fascination over the range of things that you can learn online. There’s no problem you can’t solve. The perfect body, home, car, career, and relationships are all at your fingertips. How amazing!
We didn’t have the Internet when I was growing up. I’m turning 79 today, and the world in which I grew up was an entirely different world than the one we share now. (By the way, I’m tickled that now I can tell people, “I’m pushing 80,” and watch their surprise —thanks in part to what I’ve learned online about eating well and staying active.)
I got to thinking about the countless changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.
We didn’t have the Internet when I was a kid. There were no computers or smart phones. Most homes didn’t even have TV when I started school. And we had big, heavy black telephones with rotary dials and “party lines,” which meant you and several of your neighbors shared the same line and you had to take turns making calls and be courteous and not listen to other people’s conversations.
It’s kind of fun being this old and looking back at all the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Change is life’s one constant. In fact, I have a little rock with the word “Change” engraved in it sitting on my kitchen windowsill to remind me that it’s the only thing in life that can be carved in stone.
I like that life is constant change. It’s like being inside a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope that turns with every breath and paints your stories as it flows.
Speaking of phones, in the mid-60’s I worked for the telephone company right across the Bay from the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco during the original “Summer of Love.” Hundreds of kids and young adults from all over the world came together there to get high on LSD and pot and the music of the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane, and try to find the meaning of life and to figure out how they could use love to change the world. It was a magical time.
One of the local radio stations had a weekly program I adored that featured long discussions with philosophers and mystics and poets, like Alan Watts and Allen Ginsberg and Carlos Castaneda. The show’s name was “The Ever-Changing Transcendental Multilingual Two-Ton Mustard Seed,” and its slogan was “”The program of better living through the chemistry of love.”
I liked the name immensely. I still do. Because “ever-changing” and “transcendental” describe the kaleidoscopic and multi-dimensional aspects of life. And the “two-ton mustard seed” alludes to the kind of faith you need to get from one end of your journey to the other with your heart and mind and soul intact.
That’s what it takes: great faith. In what? In the purposefulness of it all, and in its essential beneficence, by whatever name you choose to call it. No matter what befalls you, if you can trust that you are a part of some purposeful, all-embracing love, you can get through anything. In fact, if you hold on to that mustard seed, you can learn to love the changes, and the way they flow, and even learn how to direct your course as you sail through life’s changing tides.
Then, one day, when you reach a certain age, you’ll get to look back at it all and say, with a heart full of gratitude and gladness, “What a ride! What a ride!”
Wishing you a week of kaleidoscopic delights!
Warmly,
Susan