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Shahriar Shahriari |
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Message of the Month
November, 2003
Forgetfulness
Every month around this time, I am opening myself up to inspiration for the next month’s message. And sometimes the inspiration plays games with me and decides to arrive late. This month was one of those late arrivals. And when that happens, although I have developed the faith to know that it will come, I still get concerned.
So as I was waiting for the muses to connect with me, I was asking myself what if it does not come this month?
When I got really honest with myself, I realized that nothing would happen. I take my commitment to writing these messages very seriously, and from the feedback that I get from some of you, it does have its use in arising curiosity and a moment or two of reflection. But really, if they don’t come, not much would happen. Perhaps the majority of the readers won’t even notice that it is missing. A handful will miss it for a couple of months, and a few may even mention it in passing a couple of years from now. But other than that, not much will happen.
And so this itself became the source of my reflection. I realized that as human beings we are forgetful. Some may say this is one of our shortcomings, but in reality, this is perhaps one of our biggest assets.
It is fortunate that we forget. Living in Los Angeles and going through the wildfires around Southern California, I recall that the same Los Angles has gone through major earthquakes, droughts, storms, and riots, and now the wildfires. And people simply talk about those events as if they were parts of a movie scenario.
On the financial front, it was only a few years ago that the stock market went through a major "bubble", but if you talked to people last year, they would talk about the recession as if it had always been there. And throughout the past year, the stock markets have been on such an increase that has been unprecedented in history. Nobody even remembers that we are still pulling out of a recession.
On a personal front, we go through devastations in our lives. We lose loved ones. We face financial disasters. Yet we bounce back. We come to accept the loss and move on, and we rebuild our lives as if we were meant to start from nothing – or less than nothing. And the disasters and losses and devastations simply become one more story to tell others.
Perhaps this trait of being forgetful is the best asset that we have in focusing our efforts and energy on the future, on what we want to create, rather than on what we have lost, or what we have faced, or even what must be put right.
So whether one day these inspirations stop coming, or whether we face a real disaster in our lives, or even whether we are going through a major achievement and high point in our lives, it is good to remember that a couple of years from now, it will be yet another story…
© Shahriar Shahriari
Los Angeles, CA
November 2003
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