With this post I intend to elaborate my response to the intriguing provocation of the Weekly Writing Challenge. Following the indications, I chose one of the photo of the post, and added below my two cents. 

To tell the truth, I was tempted from almost all proposed images… anyway, after some rumblings, I selected “contemplation”. Contemplation is something we often I think about. Usually, to be honest, I only think about it, without doing anything. We just think that we should contemplate more in our life. But what about starting seriously to contemplate, i.e. to observe? I mean, just observe, without doing anything.

Maybe it’s me but I can’t help to feel this way. We do not observe enough. I do not, certainly.

Let me explain, so that you can evaluate if your situation is similar to mine. Namely, I’m always too full of things that I should do immediately in order to make my life better. To make myself a better person. Problem is, usually I do pretend too much from myself, so that it’s not infrequent that I cannot reach the goals that I set for myself.

In this situation, the risk of getting frustrated is everything but academic.

Because I realize that I’m still walking in the wrong path, in the wrong way.

Let’s turn to contemplation, instead. 

Contemplate reality is as taking a break. It’s like relaxing for a while. It’s just to realize that what we must do, what we are asked to do – first of all – is to let it flow. 

I know, it’s not easy. But we have no escapes: it’s necessary.

“It is necessary … for a man to go away by himself … to sit on a rock … and ask, ‘Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?”

― Carl Sandburg

I understand that there is something. Something in our life that we can reach only if we finally surrender, surrender to the flow of reality. When we stop pretending to change ourself, or change the world around us.

And start contemplating. Start experimenting the pure joy of existing. Exactly as we are. Without discarding or censoring our weakness. Loving it, instead, just as loving everything inside and outside us.

Nowadays there is a great hype on oriental philosophies, so that the emphasis of contemplation may appear to someone as just spiritual stuff imported from places outside our occidental culture and civilization. It may seems, but it’s not. See what Aristotle was saying, just a few years ago…