What Matters Most

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What Matters Most  Life is not always easy, often difficult.  Today, we are facing hard times both as a society and individually.  Often, these moments of catastrophe or trauma seem insurmountable.

 Sarah Susanka believes it doesn’t need to be this way.  

These moments of extreme pain or loss may also be the time when your life shifts in a positive direction.  At first, we identify this negative experience as a bad thing, but it’s possible that out of this experience something wonderful may enter into your life.  This is how change happens.

“Change does not feel good, and feels grossly unfair,” says Susanka, “but the reality is that it’s moving out-of-the-way the stuff we don’t need anymore so we can become something new.”  She adds, “If you look at it without the judgment that this should not be happening, but instead, as new opportunity that’s coming in a guise that you don’t yet recognize, it doesn’t have all the pain attached to it.”

This attitude will allow “positive change to come into your life.”  Life offers surprises, unexpected joys, which can come into your life.  Susanka believes it’s marvelous when you’re not laying over all the frustrations, all the pain, all the ideas about how it’s supposed to be different.  “There’s so much richness to life that we miss because of our ideas about what’s supposed to be happening,” according to Susanka.

In Susanka’s Not So Big Life, she emphasizes that the most important thing to learn is how to be present in the moment.  When you can actually “show up in the moment” with whatever’s happening, then you’re enjoying life more than you could possibly in your normal, everyday way of being in the world.

Susanka points out that sometimes you’ll experience this feeling when someone really close to you dies.  It creates an intense experience of “right now.”  She says you experience everything as though it’s magnified.  Although this experience is attached to something very sad, you often realize that this is a very profound moment.  “The profundity comes from being in the moment.”  You are fully engaged in both love and loss, and you feel more alive than ever before.

 Surviving Cancer

In her personal life, Susanka dealt with breast cancer, and she’s experienced loss and suffering, yet she still considers her adversity to be a “gift.”

In the middle of her illness, she didn’t know what to call it. “One of the things that happens when you go through chemotherapy is that your energy is dramatically depleted.  What I hadn’t known until I hit this moment was that I depended upon my vitality to do whatever I wanted to do.  Without that vitality, I could barely walk to the mailbox to get the mail everyday.  It was an entirely new experience.

“If I was thinking, ‘Why is this happening to me?  This shouldn’t be happening to me!  I’m in pain!  I’ve lost the things that make me…me.’  I could create for myself a very miserable experience.  But, it was because of this experience, I discovered that I could also just be the way I was ‘Right Now’ without all the memories of how I was in the past.”

Susanka learned to experience life from a slowed-down perspective, and she viewed the world differently.  “I got to experience things that I couldn’t experience in any other way.  So, for me, the gift of that moment was to discover how much I had missed by always rushing because the busyness was occluding the reality, the moment.  This is what we all have the opportunity to see right now.”

The Gift of Hard Times

This is the gift of hard times:  the shock of your life changing dramatically forces you to deal with reality in a new way.  It provides you with “the opportunity of really showing up in life.”

Susanka emphasizes, “What happens in these moments is that you become aware of another person’s plight, and we reach out to each other in ways that usually don’t happen when things are hunky-dory.”  Amongst all the pain, we discover our humanity, our ability to care for each other.  Crises bring forward the best in human nature, allowing us to reach out to one another.

During hard times, it doesn’t feel good in the moment, but “if you can look with the eyes of a student, everything can teach you.”  Susanka believes if you look within these very difficult times, to what you can learn from this moment, that you may discover things completely outside of your awareness.  At times like this, people help one another.  We reach out for one another, and we discover that we are always supported when we are open to that support.

Susanka points out, “Trust is an important ingredient.  If we say to ourselves, ‘This will never work.  Or, I can’t do this.  Or, I’m not good enough.  Or, I’m hopeless at this.’  All of this undermines trust in the moment and trust in yourself.”  She continues, “What you need to see is that in each moment of your life, the nutrients for your own spiritual growth, your own maturing, surround you all the time but you usually get in the way of being able to see them.

Susanka suggests that you “get out of the way” and allow the things that come into your life to influence you, then you’ll discover that “you’re perfectly taken care of.”  She continues, “It’s difficult but during hard times, you need to trust that the things around you are there for your own growth.  What matters are the people that you love.  It has nothing to do with things or material possessions.

“That’s such a revelation to us right now because so much of our lives we’ve been oriented toward the accumulation of stuff to prove that we’re getting somewhere or making it “up” some sort of hierarchy whether it’s in the job market or getting a degree or whatever your particular accomplishment or goal.  Even these things are not nearly as critical as literally being with the things in your life that are significant to you.

“They are almost always to do with people and relationships so we can feel our humanity reflected from the other humans that surround us.  I think more than anything else, when we can be with each other more completely…that’s where meaning resides.  When you can have a truly authentic relationship with somebody, there is nothing like it in this world.  That’s the kind of thing that allows us to grow in ways we can’t imagine.”