Balance

25% of Irish people check work emails while on holidays.  49% of Irish people between 25 and 34 check social media overnight if they can’t sleep.

Irish Times, Signs of the Times Survey 2019, April 27, 2019.

What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does not mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.

Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

 

As you do

The self is relatedness. Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist. . . You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation. . . . 

The self only exists inasmuch as you appear. 

Not that you are, but that you do the self. 

The self appears in your deeds and deeds always mean relationship.

Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,

Sunday Quote: fishing

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Thoreau

Make something beautiful

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Mary Oliver, Franz Marc’s Blue Horses

Again and again

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth.

Growth must be chosen again and again;

fear must be overcome again and again.

 Abraham Maslow

Life doesn’t go in a straight line

I know there is no straight road 

No straight road in this world 

Only a giant labyrinth 

Of intersecting crossroads

Federico García Lorca, 1898 – 1936, Spanish poet