Tag: wellbeing

Open to being surprised

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Our capacity for surprise is often an unused blessing. With every appearance, it prods us to ask, “Beneath our problem-solving, what is life asking of us”? “Beneath our ideas of happiness or suffering, what does it really mean to live”? So often we try to change things, only to find that our honest engagement with experience often changes us. In trying to make life fit our needs, our sense of need is often softened or broken,  until we fit life.

Mark Nepo, The Gift of Surprise

Photo:  Steve Evans, Monastery Door, Ladakh,

…. being and doing

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Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling in the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have not rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will seem silently to withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

photo : jon rawlinson

Balance…

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File:Arc-en-ciel sur l'île d'Hoëdic.jpg

Happiness is not a matter of intensity,

but balance

Thomas Merton

photo Stephanie de Nadai

Sunday Quote: Letting go of ideas

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Only the hand that erases

can write the true thing.

Meister Eckhart

photo: mgmoscatello

Shift focus

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To gain composure at stressful moments,  we can apply the mindfulness effort of letting go – abruptly shifting our attention from our thoughts to the immediacy of our physical environment. By simply being mindful in this way. we discover a visceral stillness, an “emotional space” of not knowing, like opening a door to an unfamiliar room or leaping from a diving board. When we are mindful in the immediate moment, the chaotic flood of emotions no longer view for our attention like a crowd of load, unruly voices. Instead they settle into a physical feeling, unclear and murky, but no less powerful – a vague softness around the heart or an openess in the throat.

Michael Caroll, At Times of Stress, Cultivate Stillness

Why we like speed

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Speed in work has compensations. Speed gets noticed. Speed is praised by others. Speed is self-important. Speed absolves us. Speed means we don’t really belong to any particular thing or person we are visiting and thus appears to elevate us above the ground of our labors. When it becomes all-consuming, speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don’t stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop. We keep moving on whenever any form of true commitment seems to surface.

David Whyte