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April
21 |

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Today's
quotation:
We
are all so bent
and determined to get what we want, we miss
the lessons that could be learned from life's experiences. Many
of my AIDS patients discovered that the last year of
their lives was
by far their best. Many have said they wouldn't have traded the
rich quality of that last
year of life for a healthier body. Sadly,
it is
only when tragedy strikes that most of us begin attending
to
the deeper aspects of life. It is only then that
we attempt to go
beyond surface concerns--what we look
like, how much money
we make, and so forth--to discover
what's really important.
Elisabeth
Kuebler-Ross
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Today's
Meditation:
I'm
going to die one day. I repeat this to myself fairly
often, usually when I'm tempted not to do something that
could be very important or that could help me to learn
something new through a unique experience. The
"deeper aspects of life" are the most important
ones we have, yet they are the ones that we avoid in favor
of maintaining our illusions of security and
consistency. Neither true security nor consistency
are possible in this great world of ours, yet we value
both of them to an extreme degree it seems, and we pay for
our attempts to maintain them with our neglect of the
deeper, more important things.
What
would you do tomorrow if you knew that you were going to
die next week?
So
what are you waiting for?
We
would make that time valuable by telling those we love
just what they mean to us. We would look deep into
ourselves to find out what we truly believe about life and
love and peace and happiness. We would find joy in
the simple things that life has given us, and we would
shine with that joy so that others would see us and wonder
what it was that could make us so happy. We would
realize that the surface means very very little when all
is said and done, and that the work that we've done to
reach the depths of who we are is what has brought us to a
fuller understanding of life.
But
we avoid that work. It requires solitude. It
requires us to look straight at parts of ourselves about
which we may not be so proud or happy. It forces us
to make decisions and to stick by them, especially ethical
and moral decisions. It requires us to reject much
of what we've been taught all our lives, and to see those
teachings for
exactly what they are--coping techniques that help us to
ignore the deeper aspects of ourselves and our lives.
It
can feel like standing at the edge of a dark, mysterious,
seemingly dangerous forest, but once we take the plunge
and get in there we find that the forest isn't filled
with dangers that will kill us, but with obstacles that
will help us grow and vast treasures that never would have
been discovered if we weren't willing to go beyond the
surface and give ourselves to the deeper side of life.
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Questions to
consider:
What's really important to you? Does your life
reflect that feeling of importance?
When was the last time that you saw something
superficial as extremely important? Was it really that important? What made it seem so?
How much of what we do is done because of what we think
others will think of us? On the day you die, do you want to say you've lived to
gain the goodwill of others? |
For further
thought:
We must work on our souls, enlarging
and expanding them. We do so by experiencing all of life--the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and
pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life,
to the laughter and the sorrow,
the enlightening and the
frightening,
the inspiring and the silly.
Matthew Fox
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