Sometimes when I write, I wonder if there are coincidences beyond happenstance that there is some pattern to this world where it repeats and provides learning over and over. Or is it we are not that different and will by coincidence encounter similar situations places and things. I reckon we are pretty predictable and life can be patterned so. For all our innovation, people and behaviour takes a long time to shift and we know our experiences are similar wherever we are.

Today a good warm one with plenty of Sunshine, an early visit to a fellowship meeting. Where we have a guest speaker and secretary, and an alarmingly high turnout this hot early morning. People are melting and the speaker is primed. We have a new secretary, full of good intent and plenty of their own words to test the patience of an audience never knowingly patient. Our meetings are about speakers and the responses from us the audience in the main and our fellows are never knowingly forgiving of the those who take advantage their speaking position. As if, as if we have much to say anyway!

We do of course. I listened to our guest speaking most eloquently about disadvantage, isolation and loneliness from a family background as dysfunctional as any for people our age.

A hangover of war years and parents in austerity, starved literally and starved of love and subject to war and all atrocity, no one escaped those scars. And down the generations, absence of love, aloofness and disconnection, so we don’t feel quite as we might had we been nurtured. Sad reflections as we can be tormented for the best of care given and for the very reasons we know. It makes some us find oblivion preferable to that gap inside never filled by others as we cannot fill others needs and wants for love. Our broken past laid bare.

Erudite and complete in speaking, we feel the understanding and work done to come to this conclusion. And with an intellect sharp as any I have heard the broken down wreck we all become is given a breathing space to take their own reckoning. And in so doing our guest had worked hard not only on their understanding, had worked hard to compensate and start to feel all emotions again. A heavy loss and grieving process for us all ensues as this particular breakdown requires application of all of our inner being, our emotional and spiritual core to start the mending process.

I think of these revelations as beyond our reason and into the deep of the real us, the real inside beings who have so much to learn and live. How to feel things maybe for the first time in years, to experience joy, connection and completion in the present, to stop the intellectual ego driven thought machine and live the moment where we feel our emotions truly, and don’t filter or discriminate or wonder what we might be feeling. To feel genuinely and deliver our insides in expression.

Expression of ourselves in the here and now, so hard when we have been mute and turned off for decades and in some cases never turned on since birth. It is an alarming revelation to ourselves and those who have loved our incomplete selves. We wonder as we repair how others may have stood our company let alone loved us. We preferred aloof and cold and hate and separated living so long, the warmth overwhelms and reduces us to tears when the floodgates open.

And our speaker alluded to hate, and hate being a part of redemption, for we hate as much as we love, as required in our world by our experience. Love and hate, I wrote not long back, then we know our range. As prime in our emotional capacity, all other emotions are blends and weaves of our dance with love.

My views are sustained as my experience of loving is developing. And my experience of hate too, hating the behaviour. Hating what made a situation so, maybe hating the person so challenged, that hate came from love. And we know forgiving is equal to our capacities in all our qualities and emotions, for situation and circumstance drive us one way or another. Our learning and upbringing, our experience drive our emotions, so deeply buried the eruptions we experience can be spectacular revelations to oppressed and shut down peoples.

Our appropriate responses and emotions need much time to tune to their expressions and their environs, for we have a storehouse of memories to kick off blind prejudice and access vaults of prime pain. And inside there too is love. We are not perfect and we recognise our wisdom grows in our growth in recovery from torments past. We learn for the first time our appropriate reactions and responses to all we experience. We are learners in living more completely.

Some might be cynical, some lost in these words and have no understanding yet. We learn where we are by listening and experimenting. We learn best from living life.

We were pleased this morning, sweltering hot and avid in our sharing. A good meeting of me and fellows, all equal in our learning some with more experience showing the way and others following as we can. Much to let go in these learning times and forgiveness of circumstance and people and places. We have seen our part in all we have wrought, and forgiveness to others is also a measure of how we forgive ourselves. We need accept our consequences.

Consequences mean our world is far from perfect and we may be isolated from those we might wish back in our lives. And consequences mean we accept impossible situations will never allow or enable us to go back to places where forgiveness is never going to happen. We have our own tariff to pay in our consequences and to forgive all and every situation as it has passed us by. We cannot mend broken histories, we can surely make good this present day and be the equal of future days as we learn living again.

Our gifts of living never lost as memory and experience apply in our new outlook, our new born selves, just done daily don’t reflect any advantage over any other we encounter. We might do well to realise our choices are better, our emotions understood and exercised in their rightness and with due care. We are mobilised to experience to life’s capacities and make good our way as best we can.

In so doing the good and bad of living, its ups and downs managed across our one day of living. We are able to grow with care and certainty as we encounter living the day. Whoever worked out to live in this present moment to our capacity whatever that might be, made good our connection to our ever present, present and let go past as future is taken care of in its living. It’s a Zen thing I guess? Its definitely a living thing…