Divine Disruptions

"We have only this moment,
sparkling like a star in our hand...
and melting like a snowflake.
Let us use it before it's too late."
— Marie Beynon,
as quoted in
This Year I Will:
How to Finally Change a Habit,
Keep a Resolution,
or Make a Dream Come True
by M. J. Ryan

Having arisen at 4:30 to make an airport run, when I finally returned home 3 hours later to sit in my meditation chair I wasn't too surprised to find myself nodding off a bit, even after 2 cups of coffee.

The cat, whose routine was also disrupted by the morning's activities, was determined to come indoors and join me in the chair, midway through my time, and the dog developed an itch -- probably itching for attention -- and kept scratching and jingling in the silence.

And so begins another day -- a little off, a little discombobulated -- and another opportunity to carry what calm I can find in the midst of it all out into the world; another opportunity to practice finding peace and illumination in the very obstacles that disrupt my careful routines and plans.

So often we catch our moments of quiet and our flashes of insight while on the way to something far more obvious, and yet, because they don't fit in to our grand visions of how we thought they'd happen, we tend to disregard or ignore them.

I signed up for Spirituality and Practice's online course called Catalysts for Change, and today's offerings invite us to do or change one small thing in our lives as a step toward the larger transformations we seek to implement. I wasn't quite sure what that small thing might be, given that there are so many larger changes happening without my engineering, but today I decided my act of change would be to let the cat in and let him sit on my lap as he chose, despite my need to meditate in peace.

He hopped up, of course, and patted my face a time or two, nuzzled into my elbow, and then to my surprise he wandered off. No resistance from me meant no challenging from him. And perhaps that's the lesson for today: it is our resistance that creates the distraction and the struggle. Perhaps the cat that leaps on your lap, the dog's persistent jingling, or the bird that cries out as she flies by is a Divine Disruption -- and we are foolish to resist.