I’ve recently been on a very enjoyable skiing holiday and the time on chairlifts proved to be a good time to sit and ponder and listen to my inner voice, my intuition. In other words, it was a good time to meditate. I found myself staring at piles of snow, made of innumerable snowflakes, and I realized that they had a powerful message for me, and maybe for all of us.
The lesson is that the most important thing is our ability to create. Let me explain…
We all learn at school that snowflakes are incredible things. Each individual snowflake is a thing of real beauty and each one is unique (as far as we can tell). Sitting on the chairlift, looking down on the mounds of snow below, I realized that those mounds were actually made of innumerable snowflakes. Innumerable individual pieces of beauty and uniqueness. It struck me that the universe had created almost endless numbers of snowflake beauty and they were all below me, ready to be skied upon.
The impermanence of snowflakes
The next thought that struck me was that all of this beauty is not permanent. The universe has created such vast beauty, but it’s all going to melt at some point. The universe didn’t create it and then hang it on a wall so that it can be looked at for the rest of eternity. It created all the beauty knowing that it will melt before long.
This is where I feel like I started to learn something from nature (the universe).
The ability to create
What the universe is demonstrating is its ability to create. The universe is almost showing off. Imagine making a single beautiful snowflake. That would be amazing enough, but the universe goes on the make innumerable beautiful snowflakes, and then it just lets them melt and does it all over again and again.
If you walked along and just found a single snowflake and marvelled at its beauty, you might think that this thing you found was really special. Even though it is special, what is REALLY special is the ability of the universe to create the snowflake.
It’s the ability to create that’s truly awesome. The universe is giving us this message every day and beautiful snowflakes are just one of the amazing demonstrations put before us.
This is why everything in the universe is in a continual state of change. There is no “state” of life where you can say “that’s it, we’re done”. No state that’s final, or credit worthy of itself. The important thing in life is to “create” and have the ability to create. And, you can’t create if things don’t change.
Our ability to create
Applying these thoughts to myself, I see that the state of my life is not the important thing, it’s what I’m creating that’s important.
I doesn’t matter what job I have, how good I am at anything, what grades I’ve achieved, what competitions I’ve won. All of those things just add to the current state of my life. Like the piles of snowflakes on the ground, all this will melt and be no more. What does matter is what I can create and what I am creating.
I firmly believe we have the ability to create anything we want and that’s the amazing part of life. We have much more creative power than we give ourselves credit for. We see it sometimes in others, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa, who have given us glimpses of the incredible creative power that exists within all of us. Often we think that others are be better than us as they create real beauty in the world, but we all must have exactly the same power.
The key question in life is what are we creating now? Are we creating loving situations? Are we making the lives of others better? Are we creating beauty? Or are we creating the opposite, or allowing the opposite to happen by not controlling our creative power?
There is no end to our quest. We are always creating. Every moment that we have is a creative moment. Just like the snowflakes, our creations will melt, but that’s no bother because our essence is to create and the melting of our creations provides the opportunity for us to keep on creating.
It’s our creative ability that defines us.
Inspiration for Learning from Snowflakes
One of the reasons my thoughts started drifting this way was because of something I remember reading in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s books, Conversations with God (haven’t written the review yet – soon). There is a part where ‘god’ is talking about snowflakes and says something like this – “If I can take such care to make such a beautiful snowflake, how much care would I have taken to make you?”. That’s a nice thought. It’s amazing how we can credit nature with making so much beauty and simultaneously think that we as individuals are unworthy and worthless. We can give ourselves a lot more credit than that. Our beauty and the exquisiteness of our design is far more amazing than that of any snowflake.
Beautiful