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Today's
quotation:
Do you know the more I look into life, the more things it
seems to me I
can successfully lack—and continue to grow
happier. How many kinds
of food I do not need, or cooks
to cook them, how much curious
clothing or tailors to make
it,
how many books I have never read, and
pictures that are
not worthwhile!
The farther
I run, the more I feel like casting aside all
such
impediments—lest I fail to arrive
at the far goal of my endeavor.
David Grayson
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Today's
Meditation:
I
like David's perspective here, probably because I agree
with it so strongly. When I read his words, I think
immediately back to my youth, when television was such an
important part of our lives. It was almost a
disaster when we would miss a week's episode of a certain
show--we simply felt we couldn't do without seeing each
episode. There have been so many things in my life
that have seemed to be extremely important, yet when I
haven't had them any more, I've found that I haven't
missed them.
In
many cases, I've found not only that I haven't missed
them, but that lacking them has freed me up to explore
other things, to learn new things, to open up my eyes to
many things that I otherwise might not have seen at
all. Now that I watch little television, there are
so many other fascinating things to do with my life that I
never would have known about had I continued to arrange my
evening hours around the programs that were on the tube on
a given night.
We're
taught to want things-- always more and more things.
Many of our teachers do so inadvertently, too, for they
just want to share their own positive experiences with
some material object that they've found to be particularly
useful or helpful. But when we can start casting
these things aside, we find that our time is better spent
on things that help us to grow and learn, that our energy
is better spent on things that help to contribute to the
world, in whatever small ways that we find to be the most
helpful and useful.
So
many things are great in this life, but almost none of
them are truly indispensable to us in our lives. We
have to be able to let go of the things that truly do
little to nothing for us, in order to be able to focus
more strongly on those things that we really can't do
without.
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