‘The great teachers are saying that you cannot start seeing or understanding anything if you start with “No.”*

There’s a link between “Yes” and happiness.

As we grow older, though, do we find ourselves increasingly on the slippery slope of saying no to what comes our way – new experiences in life, the experience of what is?

When we do experience something for what it really is – arguably rare, but a facet of happiness – then it simply is.  It’s not “this or it could be that:” in the experience, we’re not caught in “two minds” – we are simply present.

Wonderfully, there are many open windows in life – as Frank Laubach named them**.  Even a closed window can actually be an open window, as Marcus Aurelius pointed out:

“What stands in the way becomes the way.”^

Saying yes opens up the quest for happiness, and there’s something more.  We can’t say yes to everything, we know, but the more we are open to all there is, the more we’ll come upon the things of our happiness and know what we must say no to – something we don’t want to get this the wrong way around.

Today will have many open windows – an idea to explore, a person to speak with, an action to execute.

A quest is always about questioning, and saying yes to take us deeper..

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(**Frank Laubach’s Letters By a Modern Mystic.)
(^From Ryan Holliday’s The Obstacle is the Way.)