Author: itoccurstocp

From Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:

“Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

I had previously thought of this as an admonition to accept the wisdom of your elders, or the like, but it occurs to me that in the “counsel of years” Ehrmann is digging deeper, referring to our own internal wisdom, the things, if (big IF) we are open to them, we come to believe over time not because those things have changed, but because we have changed.  As a simple example, my thoughts on salad have changed with time.  Salad hasn’t really changed, still the same lettuce, tomato, dressing, etc.  Instead, the “counsel of years” has caused me to readjust that thinking, and resulted in my “surrendering the things of youth.”  Of course this hopefully happens on a grander stage, and the “counsel of the years” alters how I see people, races, genders, etc.  The “counsel of years” has been busy, and certainly has more work ahead of it.

Song lyrics by Sam Baker.  Give it, him, a listen.

Photo taken on a recent run.

“I have resolved from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.”  Robert Louis Stevenson

Seems like a good place to start, but I’m glad he found the time to write a few things along the way.

From Rumi’s The Guest House as translated by Coleman Barks:

“The dark thought, the shame, the malice

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.”

I pick this up and read it from time to time.  I regularly need that reminder that: “Being human is a guest house.  Every morning a new arrival.”  Indeed — Sometimes a whole tour bus before the morning passes.

 

From Anthony DeMello’s The Way To Love:

“You now carry in your heart a happiness that nothing outside of you can put there, and nothing can take away.”

It’s damn sure more difficult to locate at some times than others, but still, it’s there.  It occurs to me that sometimes, often, we are, to borrow from Johnny Lee’s song, lookin’ for happiness in all the wrong places.

From Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.”

In this noise-filled world, where silence has become the exception, it is easy to forget “what peace there may be in silence.”  Rather than inducing peace, silence more commonly induces unease and anxiousness.  If you doubt this, stop speaking (a challenge for some of us) for three, four, five seconds in the middle of a speech, a presentation, even a conversation, turn off that television or radio or (this is getting personal) stop that incessant humming and see how quickly the anxiousness floods the void.  Silence is so powerful, so attention drawing that it has become a powerful tool to get listeners to pay attention, to refocus on the things being said.  That is to say, they’d rather listen to you drone on about your PowerPointed issues than face the silence.

Still, all that notwithstanding, there can be peace in silence – if we let there be. But first, we have to “remember what peace there can be in silence.”

Photo taken in Galveston recently (Galvez Hotel), Photoshopped.

Quote from Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”  Galileo Galilei

This from a man condemned by the Catholic Church for “vehement suspicion of heresy” and sentenced to live the rest of his life under house arrest because of his belief that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the known universe.  Interesting how he was able to make the distinction between “religion” and “God,” — two things easily confused.

“And when he had spent it all, there arose a mighty famine in that land, and he began to be in want.”  Luke 15:14

I always chuckle (at least inwardly) at this verse each time I read the parable of the Prodigal son.    The younger son was “in want” long before that mighty famine arose, but this was a different “want” in verse fourteen, a “want” perhaps better stated as a “need,” a fundamental need like hunger or shelter.  Up to this point in his life, with his father and brother, and later while he “wasted his substance with riotous living” he may have had “wants” but his basic needs were certainly taken care of.  So by the time the mighty famine arises, the younger son may be experiencing fundamental need for the first time in his life.

Wants and needs, it’s so easy to confuse them.

Anthony DeMello, in The Way to Love, provides this take on the troubling passage of Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that you be not judged.”

 [T]he finest act of love…is not an act of service but an act of contemplation, of seeing.”

DeMello notes that seeing, or perhaps better stated, seeing anew, requires effort, it requires willingness to set aside labels and preconceived notions, to consider other possibilities.  Does the perceived issue with this person arise from my own upbringing or conditioning, my faulty thinking, my unawareness, or perhaps from theirs?  Are there treasures, good qualities within this person I have not previously seen?  DeMello suggests that if we study these perceived defects clinically, objectively, we will likely see that “the origin of the defect lies in childhood experiences, past conditioning, faulty thinking and perception; and above all in unawareness, not in malice.”

Ultimately, DeMello notes that perhaps the greatest gift of all is to apply that same analysis to ourselves.