Today's
Quotation:
Life is a building. It rises slowly, day by
day throughout the years. Every new lesson we learn lays a block on the edifice, which
is rising
silently within us. Every experience, every touch of
another life on ours,
every influence that impresses us, every book we read,
every
conversation we hear, every act of our commonest days,
adds something to the
invisible building.
James R. Miller
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Today's
Meditation:
If
our life truly is a building, then we must be patient enough
to build it well. For me, quite honestly, this can be
pretty difficult. I like things to be done quickly,
and I often have a hard time not rushing through things and
letting them take the time they need to be done. I
don't know how or why this came to be, but that's the way
things are with me. When I drive by construction
sites, I often can't believe how slowly things are going,
and I start to think that they should hurry things up and
get them done more quickly.
But
just how many experiences, how many conversations, how many
acts can we fit into a day or a week? And if we try to
fit in too many, how well are we going to reflect on what
we've learned? What are we going to get out of our
experiences if we try to rush from experience to experience
in order to build our building more quickly? Patience
with ourselves and with our growth is one of the most
important elements of our lives, yet it's something that not
many of us show.
We
deserve patience, though. We deserve to be allowed to
grow at a pace that will allow us to grow well and to grow
strong. If we feed a plant too much fertilizer to try
to get it to grow more quickly, it will usually die.
If we don't let a building's foundation set properly in its
own time, we'll be building on a weak foundation.
Who
we are definitely is determined day by day, week by week,
year by year. Defining ourselves and developing
ourselves simply take time, and the best thing that we can
do for ourselves is to be patient with ourselves and not
expect ourselves to develop as people more quickly than we
experience the lessons we need to learn in order to grow.
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