“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.
“We are so conscribed by the market-driven mind-set that we can no longer experience anything outside the context of “more” and “better.” We can’t take things as they are. We have moved on to the upgrade before we’ve even engaged with what we have right here, right now.” Heather Havrilesky
Reading this, the image that comes to mind is an Easter Egg hunt we have likely seen if not participated in. Children feverishly grab at eggs (usually a plastic ones filled with some “treasure”), throw them in their baskets without really looking at them or enjoying them, and quickly move on to grabbing another, and another…. It is, of course, much different now — We aren’t children, the eggs and baskets have taken other forms, and we don’t have our Easter clothes on. Still, the “market-driven mid-set” prevails. As Havrilesky posits in the title of her book – What If This Were Enough? Indeed. What if?
“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.” Frank Zappa
I thought of this quote recently after reading a news story about two Texas men who recently died in Louisiana – seemingly refuting Zappa’s theory. It seems that shortly after 2:00 a.m. the men raised the arm blocking access to an open drawbridge over a waterway, backed up their vehicle, and made an attempt to “Dukes of Hazard” the bridge and land safely on the other side of the gap. If you are mentally picturing some hot rod screaming toward the gap, think again – this was a Chevy Cruze. The scientific calculation of mass, speed angle, and distance (to the extent there was any) was apparently erroneous as the Cruze and then men ended up in the water below. There was no mention of alcohol being involved, but ….
I am sure there is some deep life lesson here, but the best I have is the thought that significant decisions (particularly those involving scientific calculations) arrived at after midnight are best implemented after sober thought is put into them the next day. “Hold my beer and watch this” rarely comes after a well thought out plan.
It occurs to me... 