full and empty

If what most people take for granted were really true-- if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now....

What a strange thing!
In filling myself,
I had emptied myself.
In grasping things,
I had lost everything.
In devouring pleasures and joys,
I had found distress and anguish and fear.

- Thomas Merton

What a strange thing, indeed, this impulse to "grab everything" and "see everything" and "know everything" so that we do not miss out on anything. It sounds like hyperbole, and perhaps it is, but how far from the truth is it, really?

Merton wrote these words of self-insight long before the Information Age, and long before the foundation of a Facebook nation and the fast-paced communication we have at our fingertips at every moment. How much more do we feel this pressure to stay on top of it all?

Then come those wakeful moments - moments of bare simplicity and still-point awareness - moments that may be quite serendipitous, and that call forth a very old wisdom and a timeless way of emptying out rather than filling up.