I found this quotation at Zen Flash, and realized it’s just what I needed to hear.

Nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now, and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.

~ Pema Chodron ~

Maybe it’s what all of us need to hear when troubling things keep popping up over and over again in our lives. They come for a reason, because we have something yet to learn.

I wrote in my blog post about major life changes how I put writing on hold to raise my children without the frustration that comes with constant interruptions. It seemed like the wise and selfless thing to do at the time, to wait until they were grown to write. Now I wonder. Especially since confronted with the same dilemma so many years later as I help raise my granddaughter.

Maybe what I need to learn is not to be “selfless” in putting aside the writing, but to examine why I feel such frustration at being interrupted, or why I feel I need uninterrupted time to write, or why I am so easily distracted? Or, contrarywise, why I feel writing is so important–some “sacred” task I must nurture in peaceful silence?

I don’t know the answer yet–what I have still to learn from this experience. But I want to examine it more closely, as Chodron advises:

Where am I separating myself from reality?

How am I pulling back instead of opening up?

How am I closing down rather than allowing myself to experience fully what I am encountering, without hesitation or retreating into myself?

What’s more, I find myself revisiting my relationship with my own children when they were young as I wrote about in my last blog post, looking at it through this new lens of raising a grandchild, as if there is something that needs re-examining? What is it I need to learn and set right? Or learn and let go?

Just yesterday a new hurt arose that echoed an old one from a year ago. This time I recognized immediately how here again was something repeating itself and challenging me to ask what I need to learn. And so I did ask, and learn. And the hurt melted away.

Why do we allow ourselves to be blindsided by these troubling repetitions, to think, oh no, here it is again, and suffer needlessly? Instead of seeing how they come to help us learn what’s needed, and be healed.