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January
12 |
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Today's
quotation:
I
had finally reached a point where keeping up such a hectic
pace no longer seemed worth it. It occurred to me
that we
had, through long hours and a lot of hard work,
achieved a
modicum of success. We had many of the
trappings of the
modern lifestyle, but we didn't have the
time, and sometimes
not even the energy to enjoy
them. And even worse, we had
little time for each
other, and practically no time for ourselves.
Elaine
St. James
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Today's
Meditation:
Hurry,
hurry, hurry--it seems to be the curse of our lives these
days. I have friends with whom I basically have to
make an appointment if I ever want to get together with
them. They pull out their date books or appointment
books to find out when they're "free."
Aren't we supposed to be always free? Yes, it's
important to work and to commit ourselves to causes, but
when those causes overwhelm us and become the focal points
of our worlds, it's time to re-evaluate.
Lists can help. Sitting down and writing down the most
important aspects of our lives can help us to see where we
should be putting our time. Most people would
write down things like friends, family, self-improvement,
reflection, volunteering for a worthy cause, work, etc.
But
when that other list gets written--the list that tells us
where we actually do spend our time--we often see the
disparity between what we know to be good for us and our
actual actions. We may spend 90 minutes commuting
and 15 minutes reading a good book. We may spend two
hours on the extra work we brought home and catch only the
last half hour of our daughter's soccer game. The
things that we know to be good for us tend to get short
shrift when we make our decisions on how to spend our
time, and in the long run we end up sabotaging our
opportunities for growth and development.
Sometimes
I like sitting around doing nothing, or reading a book
while I listen to relaxing music. There's nothing
wrong with that at all. I balance it out by making
sure that those things that absolutely have to be done
(paying the bills, raking the yard) are done, and by not
overextending myself by volunteering for every
organization that asks me to spend my time working for
them. We have to pick and choose, and it's important
that we choose those things that will help us to be better
people, not just busy people. For if we grow as
human beings we can be much more helpful to the other
people in our lives than we can if we just stay busy and
never learn the lessons that life has to teach us through
experience rather than busy-ness.
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Questions to
consider:
When do you feel overwhelmed? What causes the
feeling?
How do you prioritize your decisions concerning how
you're going to spend your time? How much of your
current lifestyle is the result of your decisions?
What kinds of things would you do if you had time to do
them? Why don't you have the time to do them?
(Be honest!) |
For further
thought:
We
are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity,
that we forget one thing, of which these are but the parts—namely, to
live. We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth
like frightened sheep.
And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy
thinking.
To sit still and contemplate . . . is this not to know both wisdom and
virtue,
and to dwell with happiness?
Robert Louis Stevenson |
more
thoughts and ideas on busyness |
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