A curious title for a post, I thought as the words popped into mind. And it’s one that could be hinting at, pointing towards, any number of ideas, topics, or whatever.

In this case, however, it is really quite straightforward: The title refers to a three-line quote I rediscovered when I was transferring notes from a full notebook to a new one the other day.

Actually, ‘three-line’ quote may not be quite correct. In fact, I have no idea if it is a longer quote consisting of three lines, or, three individual one-liners that I happen to have grouped together.

Whatever the case, I don’t know where I found this quote or these quotes. All I can say is that I was surprised to come across them as I performed the normally routine task of transferring notes.

Surprised,  because each of these lines I think, hold a special message for me; a unique piece of advice. You could even call them guidance.

Each individual line and its message is wrapped around  and driven by the verb to keep:

Keep your spirits up
Please help keep the silence.
God’s will be done and keep calm.

As a whole, this quote (these quotes) constitute  a kind of ‘how to live in the world’ mini-guide. Each – and all – of the three lines point to an aspect of what we might call Right Living – guiding us to the means by which we may approach daily life with its ups and downs, its sorrows and joys, good and bad times, mistakes, hurts, confusion, that make up our lives as flawed human beings living the best we can in an imperfect world.

Keep your spirits up

What with all those ups and downs, sorrows, daily crises – in our own lives and in the world around us – how are we to keep  our spirits up?

How do we free ourselves of the pain and suffering caused to us by all these travails?

How do we remain positive and optimistic in the face of what passes for a life ‘in the world’?

All good questions, and there are many many answers out there in that same crazy, mixed-up world that’s giving us all the trouble in the first place.

Speaking only for me, I have nowhere near reached the point where I can say that my spirits are consistently lifted, that I let nothing disturb me.

Why is that? The answer is simple: because I’m a human being. Or perhaps it’s better to say I inhabit a human body which is subject to one thing only: constant change.

I’m learning more and more that the only one I can address such questions to is me. If there are any answers to how to keep my spirits up, I’m realizing slowly that I won’t find them out there in the world or in the things of the world.

So, going within has to be at least my tentative response. It seems that there really is nothing else that will keep my spirits up for more than some fleeting often illusory moments here and there.

Please help keep the silence

What silence? Well may you ask: hardly what you’d call a quiet place to live, this world of ours.

Once again, for me, going within is a good start. Though I’m not the quietest person in the world, especially ‘within’. Too many thoughts, emotions coming and going, all the craziness of an overactive mind and heart.

But it’s a start.

I keep re-centring  when I can. I focus on my breath; recite some favourite prayers; chant mantra (the names of God); I sometimes just sit. All these do help me, will help me, I know. They do, sometimes, every now and again, for little moments, create that little (vast?) space I call silence.

As to playing my part in keeping that broader, silence? Well I’ve mentioned before the invisible community – the heaps of people all over the world who are on the same or similar paths, practising their own unique ways of going within, of cultivating both inner and external quiet, or silence.

All of which tells me, I am not alone. And it says, my little contribution to silence – to being still and quiet – actually counts.

God’s will be done and keep calm

For me, ‘God’s will be done’ is simply another way of saying that the Universe (or life) is unfolding exactly as it does in the only way it can. It just is as it is. And me, being also that life, I play my part.

And that’s all: we play our part; we do our bit, and it all happens as it does.

Acceptance of this truth is also one of those aspiration things I keep near the top of my list. Surrender, I sometimes call it. Surrender, rather than being a ‘giving up’ as we sometimes use the word, is more about going with the flow of the river, or accepting and cooperating with the flow of the natural order of the Universe as we experience it in our lives.

That ‘keep calm’ bit reminds me of that meme that was everywhere a few years ago: ‘Keep calm and carry on’. It, in a real sense, is exactly what I’m trying to do.

Surrendering, or accepting that ‘the universe is unfolding as it should’ (to borrow once again from the astonishing Desiderata) seems to be the clearest most obvious way to that calm our quote speaks about: Calm acceptance, free from the resistance and struggle against the flow of the river of life that lies at the root of much of our suffering.

So, the Dharma of Keeping. One small (or perhaps not so small) set of clues about how to live right in the world – and with the world.

The river of life is calling me to the kitchen. Even hermit monks have dishes to put away. So, keeping calm, I carry on.