Something Has Come Up

A few days ago a friend rang to postpone a meeting we had planned.  “Something’s come up,” he said.  Following our telephone conversation I pondered that phrase: Something’s Come Up.

Things do, don’t they?  Come up, I mean.  No matter how precisely we plan, and attempt to control, our lives, things change.

Something Has Come Up is the flip side of the coin where the other side is the phrase, All Things Must Pass.  Things arise, things pass.  Understanding, and accepting that simple truth allows us to be content.  Knowing this, we can be content in the midst of happiness or sadness.

Misfortune arises and I react with sadness.  Yet, knowing that All Things Must Pass allows me to be content – knowing that the sadness will pass.

When I feel happy, even though All Things Must Pass and my happiness will subside, I can remain content.

In each of the above two paragraphs I could have substituted the phrase All Things Must Pass with the phrase Something Has Come Up.  My sadness will ease because something comes up.  My happiness will subside because something comes up.

Why do all things pass?  Why does something come up?

Simply because all things are connected.

The world is not a mechanistic machine in which events occur in a linear orderly fashion.  Our western-styled culture has adopted such a view over the past few centuries.  In doing so our approach has been to break things apart and study them in isolation, neglecting the wider context and the systems within which all things exist.  So, we have learnt more and more about less and less. 

Eastern and indigenous cultures, however, have understood the interconnectedness of things and that the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.

Over the past hundred years or so aspects of western science have also begun to understand this holistic worldview.  Quantum Physics, Systems Theory, Complexity Theory, Chaos Theory, the science of Emergence, the Butterfly Effect, and many more theories and ideas are disrupting the long-held mechanistic view of the world.

Our social environment, by and large, seems to be lagging behind.  The ways in which we approach education, health, social services, commerce, energy, transport, policy-making, ad nauseum, cling to a mechanistic, piecemeal, linear approach.

By clinging to this approach we continue to think that by analysing situations in pieces, planning in a linear fashion, and thinking we have the mechanisms to fix problems, all we are doing is creating bigger and bigger messes.

We must begin to understand that we are part of an infinite, interconnected, co-existing, and co-creating universe.

That means seeing the two sides of the coin:

• All Things Must Pass
• Something Has Come Up