Category: Make the most of life

Becoming the person you have always been

Karl Duffy2 Comments

With twenty-one words, carefully chosen and artfully woven,  May Sarton evokes the quest for vocation – at least, my quest for vocation – with candor and precision:

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces.

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity – the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else!

Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak

Finding the life you ought to be living

Karl Duffy2 Comments

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe to anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing is happening there. But if you have a sacred place, and use it, and take advantage of it, something eventually will happen….

Most of our action is economically or socially determined and does not come out of our life… the claims of the environment upon you are so great, that you hardly know where the hell you are! What is it you intended? You’re always doing things that are required of you; this minute, that minute, another minute! Where is your “bliss station”?” Try to find it! Put on the music that you really love… or the book you want to read. Get it done! And have a place in which to do it! There you’ll get the “thou” feeling of life. If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a track that has been there all the while, waiting for you. And the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth; Sacrifice and Bliss.

Following our heart or security

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A multitude of forces in this world certainly conspires to divide us against ourselves, our power and authenticity, our voices, even our ability to simply listen to ourselves and believe what we hear…”Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock and go their own way” say David Bayles and Ted Orland in Art and Fear. “They get eaten! In society it is a bit more complicated, but the admonition stands: Avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society and nature…tend to produce guarded creatures” The upshot is that we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart’s deep desires, which is the imperative of all callings and one of the dominant fears in responding to them. Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks does not make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won’t make sense without.

George Michael Leroy, Calling: Finding and Following an Authentic Life

Sunday Quote: What gives us life

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Stay close to any sounds

that make you glad

you are alive.

Hafiz

Being content to miss something

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We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us -whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest.

Thomas Merton.

We have more, but less

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We have bigger houses but smaller families; more conveniences, but less time;

We have more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge, but less judgement; more experts, but more problems; more medicines, but less healthiness;

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbour.

We built more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication;
We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character; Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window, but nothing in the room.

The Dalai Lama, The Paradox of our Age