Thursday, November 17, 2011

No man is an Island - Thomas Merton

Just now a friend of mine handed me a passage he thought I would appreciate, and I sure do.  Enjoy and take it to heart as it carries much truth and food for thought!!

"Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted?

Why do we waste our time doing things, which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we are made for?

We cannot be ourselves until we know ourselves. But self-knowledge is impossible when thoughtless and automatic activity keeps our souls in confusion.

In order to know ourselves it is not necessary to cease all activity in order to think about ourselves. That would be useless, and would probably do most of us a great deal of harm.

But we have to cut down our activity to the point where we can think calmly and reasonably about our actions. 

We cannot begin to know ourselves until we see the REAL reasons we do the things we do, and cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation.

But that is enough.

It is not necessary that we succeed in everything.

A man can be perfect and still reap no fruit from his work, and it may happen that a man who is able to accomplish very little is much more of a person than another who seems to accomplish very much."

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