What is the best way to start a day? A person once asked a monk, “What is the difference between a monk’s day and an ordinary person’s day?”
The monk answered, “When does your day begin?”
The person replied, “When I open my eyes in the morning, of course.”
The monk said, “It should begin when you close your eyes in the evening.”
“If you begin your day by opening your eyes, your mind is inevitably filled with activity. But when you begin your day by closing your eyes, your mind is inevitably filled with the surrender of control.”
If we begin our day by recognizing that we control nothing, our experience of the day will taste vastly different from what it would taste like if we began by believing we have some control.
If we begin our day with poverty of spirit, we will reap the blessedness of the poor in spirit.
If we begin our day with richness of spirit, we will reap the curse of the rich in spirit.
The monk also added, “If we begin our day by spending one-third of it in complete passivity, our activity throughout the rest of the day will be blessed indeed.”
That is why the week begins on Sunday — the Sabbath — a day of rest and inactivity. Curiously, the English word “week,” from the Middle English weke and Old English wucu, means “a turning point in a cycle” — a point of breaking.
The week starts when I break — literally and figuratively. When I come to the end of myself and release all control. At that breaking point, I begin to resurrect — taste true blessedness.
The most blessed activity is born from the most blessed passivity. The most cursed activity arises from the absence of blessed passivity.
“The mind is most creative when it knows nothing.” — Eckhart Tolle
Waking up each morning is a resurrection from the dead. One-third of our day is spent in death: we let go, we break, we fall into nothingness, entrusting our spirits fully to Another.
Then, suddenly, this nothingness changes the taste of life. As Madame Guyon writes:
“In this state of Resurrection comes that ineffable silence, by which we not only subsist in God, but commune with Him, and which, in a Soul thus dead to its own working, and general and fundamental Self-appropriation, becomes a flux and reflux of Divine Communion.”
Every day and every week must begin with breaking, which is the only way to experience wholeness.
The taste of life always strikes us at a breaking point — when some unimaginable power pulls us out of sleep and opens our eyes to see the world anew.
On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail about what he experienced after his mock execution:
“…no more than a minute was left me to live. I remembered you, brother, and all yours; during the last minute you, you alone, were in my mind, only then I realised how I love you, dear brother mine! Finally the retreat was sounded, and those tied to the pillar were led back, and it was announced to us that His Imperial Majesty granted us our lives.”
When we wake up in the morning, our death sentence has been revoked. We have been brought back from the dead. Suddenly, everything tastes new.
We look at our brother and feel a love we never knew before.
Read more about the taste of resurrection in my book:
