Redpoint Fitness

August 20 2009 The Perfect Blossom

Written by Iron Addict:
Copyright 2009, RedPointFitness.com

One of my favorite movies is “The Last Samurai” starring Tom Cruise and Ken Wantanabe as Katsumoto, a Samurai Warrior. It is loosely based on a true story about the end of the traditional Samurai in Japan.

During a scene in the movie Nathan (played by Tom) walks up to Katsumoto as he is standing in a garden in contemplation. He tells Nathan he is writing a poem and has been searching for the last line for a long time. Part of the poem goes:

The perfect blossom is a rare thing
You could spend your life looking for one
And it would not be a wasted life

At the end of the movie when Katsumoto is cut down and life is drifting away from him, the scene he sees are the same trees in blossom, and the realization he gets is one available to us all. He states:

Perfect, they are all perfect.

As he realizes that all the blossoms are prefect, as are we and the world as a whole.

This is a long stretch for us in the Western World that sees everything as either good or bad and do our best to push the bad away at all costs and strive endlessly for that we deem as good.  Nice thought, but the world and the universe is not created that way, it is an endless play of Yin and Yang. There is no good without bad, no day without the darkness, high without low, warmth without cold, growth without decay, life without death.

We enjoy the good while despising the bad never understanding that everything is a play of polar opposites that are in a constant struggle to keep each other even and balanced. Things will be good at times, bad at others, but always the universe is unfolding as it should and everything is happening EXACTLY as it is supposed to—it is perfection always, even when it seems most imperfect.

And even though when you think of yourself and your world it is so very hard to see the perfection—it is there—this moment! Not a single thing is out of place and not a single thing could be any different during this mysterious instant of NOW that we all live in. Irregardless of where our thoughts carry us we live only in the micro-moment of NOW and the past is only a memory and the future is never here until it becomes that instant of NOW!

That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t strive to be better yourself and improve your condition—you SHOULD! It only means that at the moment you are at the point you are at in your path through life and it is the only place you could possibly be. What was done in the past that has brought you here is irreversible; the future is only a possibility out of all possible outcomes. What you do now may change that future, but like everything in your past it will be the only thing that you did and once at that mythical date in the future you are dreaming of, it will be just as this moment, the moment of NOW that was arrived upon by everything done and not done, and again irreversible and the only way things could have went—because they did.

Recognize the perfection of the moment and seize it. Learn to live life in every breath and it will become much more enjoyable.

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