[00:13.75]The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go. For life is a paradox:
[00:21.00]It enjoins us to cling to its many gifts even while it ordains their eventual relinquishment.
[00:27.15]The rabbis of old put it this way:“A man comes to this world with his fist clenched, but when he dies, his hand is open.”
[00:36.73]Surely we ought to hold fast to life,
[00:38.92]for it is wondrous, and full of a beauty that breaks through every pore of God’s own earth.
[00:44.98]We know that this is so, but all too often we recognize this truth only in our backward glance
[00:51.65]when we remember what was and then suddenly realize that it is no more.
[00:57.99]We remember a beauty that faded, a love that waned.
[01:02.73]But we remember with far greater pain that we did not see that beauty when it flowered,
[01:08.58]that we failed to respond with love when it was tendered.
[01:12.79]A recent experience re-taught me this truth.
[01:16.07]I was hospitalized flollowing a severe heart attack and had been in intensive care for several days.
[01:22.26]It was not a pleasant place.
[01:24.82]One morning, I had to have some additional tests.
[01:28.15]The required machines were located in a building at the opposite end of the hospital,
[01:32.67]so I had to be wheeled across the courtyard on a gurney.
[01:36.28]As we emerged from our unit, the sunlight hit me. That’s all there was to my experience.
[01:42.16]Just the light of the sun. And yet how beautiful it was - how warming, how sparking,
[01:48.53]how brilliant! I looked to see whether anyone else relished the sun’s golden glow,
[01:54.47]but everyone was hurrying to and fro, most with eyes fixed on the ground.
[01:59.82]Then I remembered how often I, too, had been indifferent to the grandeur of each day,
[02:05.39]too preoccupied with petty and sometimes even mean concerns to respond from
[02:10.17]that experience is really as commonplace as was the experience itself:
[02:15.47]life’s gifts are precious - but we are too heedless of them.
[02:19.98]Here then is the first pole of life’s paradoxical demands on us:
[02:25.87]Never too busy for the wonder and the awe of life. Be reverent before each dawning day.
[02:31.91]Embrace each hour. Seize each golden minute.
[02:36.13]Hold fast to life ... but not so fast that you cannot let go.
[02:41.38]This is the second side of life’s coin, the opposite pole of its paradox: we must accept our losses,
[02:49.52]and learn how to let go.
[02:52.23]This is not an easy lesson to learn,
[02:54.54]especially when we are young and think that the world is ours to command,
[02:58.51]that whatever we desire with the full force of our passionate being can, nay, will,
[03:03.43]be ours. But then life moves along to confront us with realities, and slowly but surely this truth dawns upon us.
[03:13.14]At every stage of life we sustain losses - and grow in the process.
[03:18.09]We begin our independent lives only when we emerge from the womb and lose its protective shelter.
[03:25.53]We enter a progression of schools, then we leave our mothers and fathers and our childhood homes.
[03:31.90]We get married and have children and then have to let them go.
[03:36.47]We confront the death of our parents and our spouses.
[03:39.70]We face the gradual or not so gradual waning of our strength.
[03:43.79]And ultimately, as the parable of the open and closed hand suggests,
[03:48.27]we must confront the inevitability of our own demise, losing ourselves as it were,
[03:54.39]all that we were or dreamed to be.
