Close some doors today.
Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance,
but simply because they lead you nowhere
Paulo Coelho.
Tag: growth
Courage
Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now.
The conditions are always impossible
Doris Lessing
photo np&djjewell
On change, choice, life and death
Two paths diverge in a wood….
You start dying slowly
If you become a slave of your habits,
Walking everyday on the same paths…
If you do not change your routine,
If you do not wear different colours
Or you do not speak to those you don’t know.
You start dying slowly
If you avoid to feel passion
And their turbulent emotions;
Those which make your eyes glisten
And your heart beat fast.
You start dying slowly
If you do not change your life when you are not satisfied with your job, or with your love,
If you do not risk what is safe for the uncertain,
If you do not go after a dream,
If you do not allow yourself,
At least once in your lifetime,
To run away from sensible advice…
Pablo Neruda from Dying Slowly
Heaven is not in the future
Until you can forgive and include all of the parts, every part belonging, every part forgiven, even the tragic parts now seen as necessary lessons, you cannot come “home.”
When you succeed at your real life task, or what I like to call “the task within the task,” then wherever God leads you, it doesn’t really matter. Home is not a geographic place. It is a place where everything belongs, and everything can be held, and everything is another lesson and another gift. “Hell” would be whenever life has come to a halt, where there is no rejoining, but all is exclusion, blaming, and denying. We no longer need to believe in hell as a doctrine or a geographic place. We see it in this world almost every day.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394) – one of the Eastern fathers of the church, and one of my favorites – defined sin as “the refusal to keep growing.” The saint and the true elder grow from everything, even and especially their failures.
Fr Richard Rohr ofm, from the webcast The Odyssey:The Further Journey
Halloween bonfires
This evening marks the important Celtic feast of Samhain which starts winter and we enter the “darker half” of the year, a theme which is somewhat reflected in the celebration of Halloween. However, the ancient idea was far deeper, as we are invited to go inside and imitate the landscape in slowing down. Some element of darkness is present in all our lives. Modern society has enough elements to keep up distracted, but inevitably, from time to time, we are confronted with life’s fragility and we are invited to welcome its lessons. Moments such as these help burn away what is not essential and bring us back to our foundations. We see what really matters and realize that searching outside of ourselves is not the way:
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames,
our one work is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
Galway Kinnell
Fail better
One of the biggest challenges in life is how we deal with disappointment:
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho, 1983
So what I’m saying is: fail. Then fail again, and then maybe you start to work with some of the things I’m saying. And when it happens again, when things don’t work out, you fail better. In other words, you are able to work with the feeling of failure instead of shoving it under the rug, blaming it on somebody else, coming up with a negative self-image — all of those futile strategies.
“Fail better” means you begin to have the ability to hold what I call “the rawness of vulnerability” in your heart, and see it as your connection with other human beings and as a part of your humanness. Failing better means when these things happen in your life, they become a source of growth, a source of forward, a source of, “out of that place of rawness you can really communicate genuinely with other people.” Your best qualities come out of that place because it’s unguarded and you’re not shielding yourself.
Pema Chodron
photo jorg hempel
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