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Today's
Quotation:
Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in
fact,
hardly exists. It
comes as a shock in life to learn that
we usually only
exchange
one set of restrictions for
another.
The second set, however, is self-chosen,
and
therefore easier to accept.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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Today's
Meditation:
As
I grow older, I find it fascinating to realize just how
negatively I've always seen words like
"restriction." When we're young, we tend to
rebel against anything that restricts our freedoms, thinking
that any such thing limits the possibilities that we have to
do what we want, when we want to do it. Only later do
we realize that many of the things that we wanted to do
would have been very bad-- if not disastrous-- for us, and
that the restrictions that we faced were actually meant to
help us and actually did so.
We
choose to restrict ourselves in many ways-- the people with
whom we associate, the types of actions that we will or will
not take, our daily schedules, the type of work that we do,
just for starters-- and those restrictions serve a very
strong purpose in our lives. None of us can do
everything all the time, and limitations are very important
if we want to hold on to our sanity and not burn ourselves
out physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
When
all is said and done, perhaps my greatest freedom is that of
being able to impose my own restrictions upon myself, rather
than having to depend upon others to do it for me all the
time. They're easier to accept because for the most
part, I know that I impose them because I know what isn't
good for me. After all, eating chocolate all day,
every day, isn't good for my health, and it also would
diminish the pleasure that I get from eating it. If I
restrict my intake, I'm helping to ensure that I will
continue to enjoy chocolate, and I'm taking care of my
health. And what can be wrong with restrictions like
that?
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