Anyone who has gone through middle age knows that one can either get out of the ego's way and proceed with change, or cling to a crumbling shore.  One must be fearless, by which I don't mean standing on the street and challenging cars, but letting go of what you think you know in order to find happiness. Often we have to approach the very things we find intolerable, even repulsive. And always the hope is to re-find our natural sense of good will to carry with us and spread.

I've been on a spiritual path since changing gears, and more specifically since my husband was deployed as a surgeon to Afghanistan. He's in harm's way, and yet despite this very real threat, I'm experiencing firsthand the importance of letting go of both fear and the urge to control.  I pause, send my prayers and thoughts, and then get on with building my life.  Life is good.

Lately, I've returned to reading the late Fr. Thomas Merton's journals. Best known for his books New Seeds of Contemplation and The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton was a Trappist Monk, poet, artist and social activist who wrote prolifically about the human experience over a 30-year period. If I could think of one way to describe him beyond his complexity, it would be this: he was enthralled with life, despite its tortuous path. The fifth journal, published after his unfortunate death in 1968,  is Dancing In the Water Of Life. It resonates the most with me, with its talk of the duality of living with solitude and chaos. There's a lot here to give perspective about the world we live in today.

September 11, 1965 – It is said that the war in Kasmir is due in part to some mechanisms of the CIA. This is a very strange outfit from what I hear, and in some ways typical of what is ill about America. It appears to be monumentally stupid in the first place! What this country has to suffer from fools in the government. But since it is the most powerful country in the world, the whole world is endangered by the folly of these idiots.

And this, after an ex-seminarian burnt himself alive in front of the UN building: "November 11, 1965 – I cannot understand the shape of things in the Peace Movement or the shape of things at all in this country. What is happening? Is everybody nuts?"

Article Author: Kanani Fong

Kanani Fong's first loves are poetry and literature. But being a writer, she also writes about the military, fashion, culture and books. Her blogs are The Kitchen Dispatch a Literary Milspouse Blog, Easy-Writer on literature and writing, and The Literary …

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