Living a Mystery

Acceptance, Faith, God, Life, Trials, Trust 0

In your search for a reason for your illness or tragedy, no reply will be forthcoming. Turn yourself to the comfort of faith in Divine guidance. The purpose of the mysteries of our lives may well be to lead us out of our dependence on human reasoning and its limited ability to account for why things are the way they are and into the acceptance that Divine intelligence is actually in control of our lives. Divine intelligence works in ways that we cannot understand, yet we can come to understand that we cannot completely trust much else. Always remind yourself that you are living a mystery, not solving one. Live within your questions that you have, but do not allow them to take over your life, your thoughts, or your actions.

— Caroline Myss, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, p. 177

Being Who We Are

Compassion, Core Value, Creativity, Guidance, Life 0

It is not what we do but how we do whatever we are doing that makes a difference. When we know ourselves we are able to make choices to do those things that, given our individual preferences and personalities, make it easier for us to be who we are — compassionate and openhearted and present. We are able to choose to do what we know we love.

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 140

Letting Go of “Should”

Growth, Healing, Life 0

People often substitute “I should” for “I want.” I call this the beginning of internal civil war. The minute you say, “I should,” you have created division within yourself. “I should” always comes from others. Parents, rules, religious teachings, and cultural norms give us our shoulds. Not that this is necessarily bad. We do need to learn how to function in society in a helpful way. At some point along the road to adulthood, though, we need to internalize those ideas or discard them for good. If you say “I should,” it means some part of you doesn’t want to. Honor those parts! They have precious information for you. Let them speak to you fully, like a good council. Hear everyone’s opinion, and then make your singular decision.

If you can say “I want,” then you are coming from a more integrated place inside yourself. Try it for a moment: “I should clean the kitchen.” Doesn’t that just tighten your stomach and make you feel as though you don’t want to? Now say “I want to clean the kitchen!” How does that feel different? When we say “I want to,” we are taking complete ownership of our situation. No excuses, no resistance, no blame.

— Susan Pease Banitt, The Trauma Toolkit, p. 8-9

Learning to Fail

Forgiveness, God, Growth, Life 0

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: “Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the centre of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes — for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.”

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.

— Lauren F. Winner, Still, p. 193-194

Learning As We Go

Growth, Life 0

The notion that we can become all that we’re meant to be, all at the same time, all instantly, all at once, without bungling along as we go, is pure fantasy. Or to put it another way, the notion that we can make great life decisions once and for all without learning as we go is pure naiveté. Life is not a paint-by-numbers game.

— Joan Chittister, Following the Path, p. 86

Resilience

Acceptance, Growth, Healing, Life, Trials 0

The world shifts, and lives change. Without warning or reason, someone who was healthy becomes sick and dies. An onslaught of sorrow, regret, anger, and fear buries those of us left behind. Hopelessness and helplessness follow. But then the world shifts again — rolling on as it does — and with it, lives change again. A new day comes, offering all kinds of possibilities. Even with the experience of pain and sorrow set deep within me and never to be forgotten, I recognize the potent offerings of my unknown future. I live in a “weird world,” shifting and unpredictable, but also bountiful and surprising. There is joy in acknowledging that both the weirdness and the world roll on, but even more, there is resilience.

— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, p. 60

Go Deeper

Acceptance, Growth, Life, Writing 0

When I coach students through essay writing, I invariably give the most able the same direction: go deeper, go deeper. In each iteration, reveal more, of who you truly are, of what you really think. That’s the hallmark of aging, too, that we learn to go deeper, in our friendships, in our family life, in our reflections on how we live and how we face the future. The reason we develop an equanimity about our lives and ourselves is that we have gone deep into what has real meaning.

— Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, p. 149

Me, Too

Acceptance, Growth, Humor, Life, Trials 0

The last few years have afforded me much experience in Coping with the Crappy Parts of Life referenced in the title of this book. However, it must be said that the Crap, plentiful as it has admittedly been, is overshadowed still by the Amazing, the Humbling, the Gratifying, and the Nifty. My prayer for us all is that we’re always able to pay more attention to those things in our lives and laugh our way around the Crap.

— Jill Conner Browne, Fat Is the New 30: The Sweet Potato Queens’ Guide to Coping with (the crappy parts of) Life, p. vii