Allowing

"There is no need to hurry when you don't know where you're going."
~ C. Dudley Brown

Dudley Brown is an elderly friend who has spent the past several days in the hospital waiting for admission to a rehabilitation facility. Each day I would check in with him only to find out that he still waited in "medical limbo." A couple of times he was told "today is the day" but to no avail. At the beginning of the process when I asked him how he was doing he would express aggravation and frustration. Yesterday, there was a peaceful, complacent tone in his voice as he said, "There is no need to hurry when you don't know where you're going." I immediately said, "Dudley, can I quote you on that?"  He said, "Of course you can.  I just made it up!"

"Just made up" or not, there is much wisdom in this simple statement, wisdom that cuts across so many areas of our lives.  Unfortunately we have a tendency to see it in retrospect. For example, how many times in your life has urgency turned into "hurry up and wait?" When was the last time you worried about something that never happened?  What about something you feared that ended up being harmless? How much energy do we spend unnecessarily trying to force-feed our lives?

How much more peaceful would our lives be if we could stop urgency, worry and fear in their tracks by relaxing and allowing life to unfold? Allowing is a process taught in some Eastern traditions as "letting go of results." Allowing our lives doesn't mean we're to sit back and let anything happen. We still come to the table with desires, intentions, and visions, but we don't try to force the outcome. We allow the results to come to us. One may even make the leap and say that allowing the results means we really never know where we are going. The secret is to trust that our destination will be where we belong.

By the way, after a week of waiting, last night Dudley was assigned to a rehabilitation facility, one that has previously "fallen through" but "came through" in its own time. Could it be that he finally allowed it to happen?

"Slow down you move too fast. You've got to make the morning last."
~ Paul Simon