Winter is a time of year that we have less light, obviously. It becomes cold and dark. And for a lot of us, I think it’s a more difficult time than the summer, for sure.
It’s colder. And many of us, including me, don’t like the cold. But I guess you have the clothing, so you should be thankful to be alive, of course.
But winter always poses a question, of course. Why don’t we live metaphorically in the light all the time? And I’d like to share a bit of an experience I had recently.
I was in Canada over the holidays, and I went to visit a friend of mine, an older gentleman. He just turned 95 when I was there. Remarkable.
Still has all his wits about him, so to speak. He’s a clever man. He’s a reader.
I had a lot of respect for him. And for a moment, he said to me, Leon, let’s watch a bit of the news. And we turned it on, and it was just literally murder and mayhem.
And I said, I got to stop because this is just not reality. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, no one that I know has ever been stabbed, blown up, shot.
But of course, these things do happen. Yes, they do happen in reality. But I think most people do not experience them on an ongoing basis.
So watching the news only fears me. It only actually gives me fear, if you will. It fills me with fear.
And this is not reality. So then I got to thinking, where does this fear come from? Well, obviously, it comes from the time, some 100,000 years ago or so, that we left the Rift Valley in modern-day Ethiopia, and grass was quite high.
And if we weren’t careful, if we didn’t pay attention to sounds in the grass, we were dead, so instinctively we developed a fight-or-flight mechanism.
And it’s fear, and you see it presented today when you go into, for instance, a government office or a shop that is overwhelmed with people. The workers attack you. Basically, they’re not polite, they’re not nice.
The other day I said, Happy New Year to a man, and he gruffly responded, is all fear based, lack of love. Absolutely. So why is that as such?
Well, I think that lack of love is nurtured. It’s nurtured in our movies, it’s nurtured in video games, and negative apprehension, if you will.
You know, so then you say to yourself, well, okay, if that is the reality, how can I possibly get out of this and live in the light? Which is, I think, what all human beings ultimately want, right?
And I think the only way you can do this is that you have to realize that this moment, wherever you are, right now, right now, if you stop for a moment, just stop, you will hear, obviously, total silence.
And whatever your condition, whatever your race, whatever your color, whatever your socioeconomic situation, that moment is yours alone. That moment. And there is no past because the past is gone.
Whatever good or bad things that have come to you are gone. They’re over. And the future is an illusion because you hope to be better.
But it might, of course, be worse. One never knows. But it doesn’t matter because it’s not there yet.
All you have is the moment. The moment, the now, as Eckhart Tolle calls it. And it’s so very real, isn’t it?
Prisoners, I’ve read, that are facing 20 years to life, sentences like this, talk about living one day at a time, doing your sentence, your penance, whatever it is, one day at a time. I think we are the same. So this is where the light exists.
Dr. Frankel, in his book Mansur’s for Meaning, talks in a passage about walking in a stone quarry. And these are all intellectuals, doctors and lawyers and the elite of society.
And they’ve been arrested, in this case, because they’re Jews. And many of them, of course, are non-practicing Jews for generations, been totally integrated. They’re non-Christians, in other words, they’re non-theistic.
But because of their heritage, they’ve been arrested and here they are. And in a death camp, of course, if you were a young mother with children, you were usually dead within 30 minutes, if not less.
And then the men were designed to be basically starved to death in six months. But he survived. He survived three years, and everyone around him died, all the people he loved.
I think I’ve said this before, probably. You know, his wife died, his brother died, his wife’s brother and his parents, all dead. But he survived because he was able to catch the moment, which is what he documents in his book.
Right? And when you catch the moment and you live in the moment, you basically are free. You’re free to do what you want to do in your life.
And so you think to yourself, why should we live in the light? And how can we live in the light? Well, many people say I should try to always be truthful.
Truthful, firstly to myself. I must, as painful as it might be, I’ve got to tell myself the truth about my situation. And when I tell the truth, I’m capable of changing that truth, aren’t I?
I think that I should pay attention. I really should begin to pay attention. You know, social media is so distracting in a way.
But if I stop for a moment and I begin to pay attention to the bugs and the bees and the other people around me, you know, it pulls me to a level of humanity, I think, in a sense that is very, very precious.
And then also I think you should make an attempt for gratitude. You should practice recalling what has occurred in the past.
And in the past, if you’re feeling disheveled mentally today, there’s always something good in the past, something romantic, something botific, as simple as a good meal, a kiss from your mom, of course. And in a negative world, let us not be cynical.
Let’s look for the good things. And that’s why I asked my friend to turn the news program off, because let’s not kid ourselves. It’s a tough life.
It’s hard to be alive and develop the beautiful me. It is. But that’s why we’re here.
We have to complete our mission, right? Because my life matters. I think we have to remind ourselves on a daily basis.
There’s no one like me. There never has been and there never will be. But conversely, I must get to work on me.
And the little thing that I remind myself every day is when I promise… I have a lot of students, right? I teach a lot of people.
And I constantly promise I will do things. And I write them down. And I memorize them.
I try not to forget anything I’ve promised to do. As simple as I’ll send you a note, or I’ll arrive at a certain time, I’ll be there on Monday, whatever it is. Whatever it is.
And I think life be suffering, of course. But that’s part of life, isn’t it? I just don’t think we have to be like monks and accept that suffering is a normal part of the human condition.
Because I don’t think it is. I think that we can overcome. We all, I think, following Aristotle, we all have the capacity to be happy.
But happiness is a process. And happiness is work, isn’t it? And I think we should try to be modest, if at all possible.
And I think we could say that I am humble before God and modest before my fellow man. And I think it’s important to realize that it is a very, very long life. But eventually that very, very long life will cease.
It will cease. And then I will have to transcend and follow what I believe, my religion, of course, very important component. Why am I here?
What’s my mission? What happens when I die? When I transcend this reality?
And I think, in those ways, we are going to start to look for the light. You know, and something I do as well, and I think many people have told me similar things. I try to get to a point that I can actually see the physical light at times.
This is why I enjoyed the summertime, to be honest, so much, because it is so filled with light, and the air temperature at that point is warm. But of course, on a cold, cold winter’s day, when you bundle up, the light is also magnificent.
There’s no question at all. So I think we should push on, and we should remind ourselves that this aspect of positive thinking is in effect real. Little story.
I was in a Uber, and I asked the driver, how are you doing? And he said, not very good. And he tells me a litany of problems.
He’s come to Canada because he wanted a better life. He’s an academic, but because of his accreditations, he’s got to redo his school and he doesn’t have time.
And so he opened a business and the business failed, and now he’s driving a Uber, and he feels it’s beneath his station. He’s really unhappy. And so I said to him, well, you know, the wonderful part about life is very long.
And he said to me, look, I don’t need a positive attitude here. And I got a little irritated, and I said to him, I’m not being positive. I’m just telling you the truth.
In your life, you have a choice. You truly do. You have a choice between being a hero and being a coward.
It’s up to you. There is no middle ground when it comes to me, if you’re a conscious and thoughtful being. Because if you look at children, children are not yet fully conscious, I would say, and they’re totally happy.
They’re filled with imagination. They don’t have the problems that our full consciousness produces. So I think we have to be somewhat childlike and realize the reality of my life is given by me.
Me. Because there is ultimately no one but me. When I’m not here, there is no consciousness.
I’m transcending to something different. This is certainly what I believe. So, think about living in the light and you do it by living in the moment, obviously.
And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is everything, especially when you want to live in the light.
And critical thinking is great. Truly great. God bless.
Bye-bye.