Rolling Where Life Leads

March, 2017
by Lynntia Kir-Stimon Sutton

I find peace through solitary walks. I especially find peace and contemplation during my very long beach walks. These offer me the respite I need from life's many complications.

Before me, an array of pebbles tossed across the sand have left thin lines, slight descriptions of their past experiences.  

A dense collection of rocks behind me, even as unmanufactured and apparently random, I am drawn to notice the various patterns within this grouping. 

The moment of spiritual reflection now upon me, I ponder how perfectly as individuals we are meant to be together, how we fit together in this Mosaic of Life. Tossed together, often by choice and sometimes not, our unique family combinations and circumstances are perhaps not so random after all. Although in honesty, at times we may dislike the threads and the connections or find them almost too hard to bear, our greatest gift is in fully accepting that these connections exist and are there for some perfect fated reason.

Some of our diversities are certainly the result of firm choices and seem easier to track than others. Those are the easily identifiable, key decisive moments that we know have resulted in the framework around our lives.

Then, there are the other places where we find ourselves just somehow arrived. Those are the circumstances not founded solely on personal choice and where I have come to believe and feel other forces to be at play. I have certainly felt tossed in a certain direction at various times in my life; and that direction has not always been obvious at the time or of my command.

Swept sometimes close to the comfort of whatever we call “home” and sometimes far from. These waves push, sometimes gently and sometimes rough. We are often thrown straight into a tide of circumstance, dilemma, challenge, and blessing we did not intend or expect.

Like many stones that jettison quickly into or simply roll past each other, it’s difficult at times to track where and how we are propelled. Without a lingering sand-line, however faint, to use in guidance we can be burdened with wondering about the overall pattern here. What exactly was presented for us, how might we have altered that course in life, where do our lessons lie?

Continuing to walk the beach, I know the smattering of rocks especially after last night’s storm, are left in a maybe-not-so-random pattern along the shore. In accepting the pattern, in accepting our lives and who we are in our diversities and differences, we find the answers. Our “different” offers most of us great challenge. Within that we can find the presence to design and act.

One answer for many of us is often not in the “why” but in the “how”. We just learn to creatively make it work. And we do it again. And again. And again. Through ongoing acceptance, we tame the forces of shame and divisiveness and fear. 

Strength, service, love, hope and connection are the elements that we use to piece our lives together within the challenge of “different”. The glue, the substance, that holds us together in our diverse elements, is authentically embracing and accepting who we are and realizing our individual lives somehow fit together beautifully in our own perfectly imperfect Mosaic.

We trust our whole is greater than its parts.

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