Difficulty

I’m reading Elizabeth Lesser’s wonderful book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. Lesser is one of the co-founders of Omega Institute, the model for the place I want Ananda to become, on a smaller scale.
Here’s what she has to say about the choice we all must make, repeatedly, in our lives:

To be human is to be lost in the woods. None of us arrives here with clear directions on how to get from point A to point B without stumbling into the forest of confusion or catastrophe or wrongdoing. Although they are dark and dangerous, it is in the woods that we discover our strengths. We all know people who say their cancer or divorce or bankruptcy was the greatest gift of a lifetime…But we also know people who did not turn their misfortune into insight, or their grief into joy. Instead, they became more bitter, more reactive, more cynical. They shut down. They went back to sleep…I am fascinated by what it takes to stay awake in difficult times.
And she quotes lines from Rumi:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
I love this. I also think about the challenge in thinking you are responding to difficulty by growing, but in reality you are deluding yourself, the ways we convince ourselves we are right and what we are doing is the best thing, when what we’re really doing is running away and shutting down. And the courage it takes to really face yourself so you know the difference.