Learning to trust the unknown

The sun does not ask permission to rise.

There was once a traveler who woke every morning before dawn, afraid.

"What if today is the day it does not come?" she asked herself. And so she stayed awake, watching the horizon, as if her worry were the thing that pulled the sun into the sky.

One morning she met an old woman sitting in the dust of the road, doing nothing at all.

"Why are you not afraid?" the traveler asked. "How do you know the sun will rise?"

The old woman smiled. "I don't know. I only know that it always has, and that nobody ever asked me to carry it."

The traveler was quiet for a long time.

"There are two voices inside you," the old woman said. "One lives in your head. It is clever and it is loud. It remembers every fall, and from those memories it builds walls and calls them wisdom. It is the ego, and it believes that if it stops controlling, you will perish. The other voice lives lower, near the heart. It is very quiet. It has never needed to shout, because it has never been afraid."

Modern scientists have seen the first voice at work. They found that our minds wander for nearly half of our waking hours, and that when they do, we are less happy. Much of that wandering is the mind replaying the past or rehearsing a future that has not come. They have also found that quieting the mind through meditation calms the body's stress response.

Long before the studies, the old books said it plainly. "Be still, and know," the Psalms say. The Tao Te Ching asks: can you wait until the mud settles and the water clears? And the Yoga Sutras say that yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind.

"You don't have to fight the noise," said the old woman. "Put your hand on your heart. Breathe. Let the thoughts pass like clouds. Behind them, there is a stillness that you did not make and cannot break. It is the same force that moves the sun. Rest there, and from there, take your next step."

The traveler did as she was told. She closed her eyes, and for the first time in a long while, she heard nothing at all. And in that nothing was a peace so wide that her fear had no place left to stand.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was rising, as it always had.

"I see," she whispered. "It never needed me to hold it."

"No," said the old woman. "It only needed you to trust it."

And so it is with the unknown. We are not asked to know the road. We are asked to walk it, from the heart, one step at a time.

Say this each morning, with your hand on your heart:

"I let go, and I am held."

— InnerWorldGuide