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Today's
quotation:
The
trouble with many of us is that we just slide along in life.
If we
would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what
we want out of life that we give to the question of what to do
with
a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards
and the aimless procession of our busy days.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
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Today's
Meditation:
So few of us
ever sit down and consider just what we want from our
jobs, just what we want to give to them and just what we
want to accomplish with them. Even if we're just
serving or cooking fast food, we can still do many things
with our jobs that others simply don't. Instead of
just taking orders, we can try to create positive
experiences for the customers; instead of just throwing
the ingredients together, we can do our best to make each
piece of food that we make the best it can be.
In
our families, do we do our best to create conditions in
which we all can thrive, or do we just let life slide by,
day after day, on autopilot, hoping that nothing terrible
happens to shake the status quo? Do we think about
what we want to look back on ten or twenty years from now
in order to decide whether what we're doing now will
actually contribute to that ideal? If I reflect on
what I want from life and I decide that what I really want
is to have helped young people, but my current work gives
me little to no contact with young people, then guess
what?
"The
aimless procession of our busy days" is a troubling
phrase. We tend to equate busyness with
accomplishment, but that's not necessarily true at
all. Sometimes we simply get so busy that we lose
sight of any goals, any aims, that we might have, and we
just get caught up in doing what "needs" to be
done without doing anything to personalize it or to turn
it into the kind of accomplishment that we truly hope for
in life. Our lives really are ours, if we take the
reins or the wheel, but most of us kind of loan them out
to others who don't necessarily need us personally-- they
just need someone to do the jobs they need to have done.
What
will your life be like over the next ten years on your
current track? What will your family be like ten
years from now? What will you have accomplished on
the job during the next decade? If you're not all
that happy with the answers you find, then perhaps change
is in order. And the change doesn't need to be
drastic-- sometimes just a shift in perspective and
attitude can do wonders to rejuvenate us, to help us to
reach our goals and fulfill our dreams. One thing
that is true, though, is that we'll never see the need for
any sort of change unless we reflect on the lives we're
leading and the things we want from life, as well as the
things we want to contribute to life.
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