wisdom – Page 2

Grieving

November 11, 2014

In order to love and accept our life and those around us as they are, we must learn to grieve what we thought they would be. Without doing that, we will always love our ideals more than we love the actual thing. This does not mean we have to stop wishing for things, for hope is a good thing. In fact, if we do not do this sort of grieving, we will not be able to hope. We will only have depression – the kind that follows when we do not get what we thought we should have. Everyone goes through this kind of disillusionment – mostly in our adulthood (there is a normal developmental idealism that carries us through our youth). Our marriages, our careers and our lives in general undergo this disillusionment and it is totally normal! Maturity is the consistent “surrendering” of our ideals to attempt to love what is, rather than what we hoped would be. Again, the hope is good. Our demands for what we hope are what are dangerous. Read More

Work/Rest

November 9, 2013

Remember that there is a natural rhythm to life. You must work and you must rest. Too much of either of those is not a good thing. If you are constantly working and not resting, you will run yourself into the ground. And if you rest too much, you will actually make yourself more tired. Instead, it is wise to heed the adage: “work hard, play hard.” When you are working, you should give yourself to it fully, not constantly wishing for rest while you do it. And when you are resting, you should give yourself to that fully, not constantly feeling the need to work. When you do one well, you will be able to do the other with equal abandon. Read More

I Am Valuable, I Am Nothing

October 30, 2013

The paradox of being human is that you are nothing and very valuable all at the same time. It’s a little hard to understand, but if you look around, you will see that you are a very small part of a very big universe careening through time – just one very small speck in a very large nebula of actions and reactions. It’s easy to think that what you do doesn’t really matter. It’s true, it doesn’t; and yet, you are also very important. You have probably also had the sense that what you are doing and who you are are very meaningful. You are valuable only because someone loves you. If you come to this realization, it is easier not to take yourself too seriously (a very important part of wisdom), and also easier to start doing the things that are “meaningful” and “really matter.” Read More

Sketching

September 28, 2013

I heard a friend say once that “works of art are never finished, only abandoned.” My art teacher in high school taught me to develop a composition moving around and across the entire image at once, sketching in parts of the whole a little at a time, rather than finishing one part in detail and then moving onto another (which may be our tendency). Life is kind of like that, too. You don’t ever really finish it. It’s just that one day you die. You might not have everything lined up perfectly, but if you work on a few parts here and there, paying attention to the whole sum, over the years, you will get somewhere and people will start to see the whole picture that you are sketching. Read More

Something Needs to Die

November 24, 2012

My friend and mentor has told me this many times: somebody told him once that when you are depressed, you want to die. And you obviously don’t need to die, but something in you needs to die.

That is brilliant. I think I go through this almost weekly depression and many times, I have no idea what is going on, but sometimes I feel like God is trying to kill something in me. More often than not, it has been when I have grown hardhearted, or I am trying to hold onto something that has needed to go for a long time. Read More