The seeker climbs up in the mountains.

Transition is the point between one place and another.

Most people appear to either want to stay where they are or leap into the next event without resolving what they left behind. We make transition when we bring closure where we can, taking time to reflect on who we now are, and who we can become. We have ourselves -- unbonded from what went before and not yet attached to what is to come.

To make transition is to re-find oneself in the now.

I'd advise you allow pauses between tings throughout your day, so you may practice also taking time for the major transitions in your life.

"And I wonder now if anything would have been different had she not been so pretty, had her body not been young and healthy and strong but ugly, fat, and flabby. Possibly not. Possibly it would have happened anyway. The inevitable punishment of the outsider.

But it seems to me more likely that it was precisely because she was beautiful and strong, and we were not, that Ruth and the rest of us had done this to her. To make a sort of judgment on that beauty, on what it meant and didn't mean to us."

-- Jack Ketchum
The Girl Next Door

Take *that*, you happy ruffians you!

"...the manner in which you present this particular idea, which I've seen you express, with slight variation, on numerous occasions, is one that reads like a paraphrase of the central argument in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals."

Ahahahahahaha. And boo to you, lover, for stealing my Kant quote, just when I feel the need to follow one paraphraser with another!

I'll instead substitute this;

"Man is still in his childhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not imposed on him against his will, nor can he find satisfaction in a good created by his own action. He is afraid of a universe that leaves him alone. Freedom appalls him."
-- George Santayana

I'm only good for quotes, which is quite good enough, but bear with me anyway.

"...it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know their hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."

-- Michael Cunningham
The Hours

The seeker swims in the clear water.

We do not perfect ourselves, we complete ourselves in each moment. The goal is to sense that we are totally one with the life force, not just in some great ecstasy but in the daily round -- thus reaching a vital state of conscious harmony.

The practice of wholeness neglects nothing, neither good nor bad, weak nor strong, ugly nor the ideal.

Center is found both within and without.

Each moment has richness for those who choose life, so my advice, darling? Live yourself the energy you feel in the situation; you don't need anything more than that to affirm that you exist.

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

-- Flannery O'Connor
A Good Man is Hard to Find

"I bet you think this song is about you, don't you?"

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

-- Joan Didion

The waves come in to overwhelm the seeker.

One of the hardest things for people to accept, darlings, seems to be the reality that not everyone or everything is meant to make it in this life. How few people, it seems, understand how to accept their losses, expressing grief, but then let them go. Too many, I think, never make it to acceptance; too many more never make it out of grief. I know few to none who actually make it to letting go. And when they do, that becomes their sticking point. The endless gloficiation and homage to the process of letting go, in all it's glorification of the past and glorification fo the future. "Letting go" as hobby, pursuit, active engagement ... can you not see the contradiction in how much *energy* you are applying to this "letting go".

This is the reality: Ending is irreversible change. A true end is never a beginning.

Perhaps people have trouble letting go because it requires giving up ties to the past -- in ending, not even memory can serve as a guide. Letting go requires you release what was and what never again can be. It requires you live what you have now without putting energy into what could have been. And, here's the tricky bit, without putting energy into what may come.

So often, when I see this achieved, I then see it responded to negatively. Lack of understanding leads to the misinterpretation of acceptance and grief and letting go as lack of feeling. Lack of investment. Lack of involvement. Lack of, at the very least, *caring*.

How to express how opposite it is? That acceptance and grief and letting go require passion and commitment and investment so whole and complete that it's a wonder the body can bear such intensity.

You delude yourself if you think your attachment to grief and your attachment to the past, or the future, indicates your commitment to anything but continuing your Ego's ability to soothe itself with stories of it's own importance. The Ego is the only one impressed with the depth of it's own suffering. Or, for that matter, it's own 'noble' searching. You think incorrectly if you think you are "honoring" the past. And you think incorrectly if you are "honoring" the future.

And you would understand everything I ever say if you fully understood this: Redemption is in the present moment. Only there do we have the choice to live differently.