What is, is what is. You can’t change it. It already is what is. Change, however, is always happening, so change, it will. We never know what will appear in the next breath, or if we’ll be given a next breath. It’s impossible to know. It hasn’t happened yet. There are too many variables, so many things in play, that just trying consumes every bit of energy, eating up the lifeforce like Pacman gobbling up dots bite by bite.

The next appearance on the stage of life doesn’t have to look like the current one and most likely won’t. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed not to. We humans tend to see what is here now, taking it as THE reality, not realizing that it is only this moment’s stage show.

When it is unwanted, we resist, fearing it will stay around or at the least, dismally color what’s next. When it is pleasing, we grab on, fearing it will slip away, that we will lose what we want, that we won’t have what we need.

Regardless of whether the current appearance is pleasing or not, it will slip away. Everything does. Life is not one unending note, forever played. It is change, an ever-alive symphony, always new, always fresh.  Our notes in the song are always new and different. What’s here today will be gone tomorrow. There is no need to resist or to attempt to hang on. Every expression ends. Nothing hangs around.

Generally, we don’t notice the changes, the subtle nuances, the warning cracks and fissures. We see what was, right up to the moment the magma flows and the red streaks and grey explosions appear. We tend to miss the tiny shifts that add up to a life, thinking nothing substantial is changing, until we look in the mirror and wonder how that happened.

To remain open and present to the intricacies, to actually feel life, to live it breath by breath, alive and in wonder, deeply genuinely truly realizing that life doesn’t have to be any certain way, slips a layer of conditioning off the informing design, allowing the basic hearticles of life to simply form as they will, as love wills, with less of the push pull of what has come before.

Of course, attempting to remain open when you really aren’t, when you want to close down, when you feel the need to grasp or to push away, isn’t a genuine response, and life is excellent at discerning what is real, at grokking where we currently resonate, and never fails to fine tune our vibrating strings in tune with what is real.

How does life know? Oh, that’s easy. It is us. It can’t be fooled. It’s not something separate, someone looking at us from a distance. We are this that knows, this that informs the next breath with our resistance, our desire, or our simple embrace – our love – of what is arising. We are the cello, the cellist, the strings and the bow, and the music that emanates from all the instruments and fills the universe.