The Wisdom in Blinking

I hope you all had a great week and happy holidays to all that celebrate. Early last week I was having a conversation with a friend that is likely one many of us have had about the nature of people; the idea of “glass half full” versus “glass have empty”. It has been shown in studies that we are undeniably born with a specific constitution on how we see the world. However, what is talked about less is the great power we hold to shift this perspective within ourselves. It truly is a choice explained beautifully in the excerpt below from The Wisdom in Blinking, by Mark Nepo. 

We blink a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day the world goes dark. A thousand times a day we wake. We can’t escape this opening and closing. It’s a reflex we can’t control. Even as you read this, your eyes, along with your heart and mind, are blinking– opening and closing repeatedly, no matter what you do. It is part of being human. Yet so much depends on which you see as home– being open or closed.

Do you see life as one stream of light interspersed with nights of dark, or as one stream of darkness interspersed with days of light? Though there will never be an answer, what we believe about the nature of life matters. It lifts or burdens our days. Obviously, there are times we feel one way and times are certain it is the other. There are even times we know it is both. But how we allow for both– how much we make the light our home and how much we settle into the dark– determines the personal alchemy of our hope and despair, our optimism and pessimism, our belief and doubt. 

Perhaps the wisdom in blinking is that it keeps us in the middle, keeps us from drowning in the dark and from burning up in the light. Perhaps this is the reflex that lets us make sense of being human. 

We practiced this concept in our bodies this past week on the mat; noticing the aches and pains but still choosing to live in the light is what this practice truly offers and what we practice on the mat we become better at off of it. 

While I think of myself as generally a “glass half full” person, I am aware of times where my mind can quickly habituate to the other side. What we practice, we get better at– whatever it is so it is in those times that I look to the practice to remind me that no matter what our pre-disposition may be; we have the power to fill our own glass.