Tag: books

The Gift Of Spiritual Impatience

The Gift Of Spiritual Impatience

That was the last of them.

The third box of books was loaded into the car, the next stop was the barn behind the old church, the storage point for donated books for their annual used book sale later in the year. 

Perhaps it’s an age thing, but I’ve been downsizing many segments of my life of late. The stuff I’ve collected over a lifetime which I no longer want to hold on to. Stuff. Expectations.

Today, it was the books’ turn to go. 

As I loaded the boxes, I realized that the vast majority of them were books I never fully read, as indicated by the number of bookmarks I found lodged into the first third of the pages of many of them. I guess the enthusiasm which motivated me to initially purchase them greatly waned as I actually started to read them. With so many of these books being not fully read, I realized there was one thing each of these unread books had in common.

Me.

I’ve had an interesting relationship with books. My now-almost-empty bookshelf was filled with the books of a seeker; non-fiction, self-help, self-improvement, spiritual, psychological, and growth-oriented themes. I bought each one for a specific reason, yet at some point early in these books I’d become a bit disillusioned and put them down only to then pick up the next book I had also excitedly purchased, only to abandon it early on just like the others before it. 

Giving up on a bad book seems logical, but when you give up on all the books the books aren’t the problem. 

As someone who has been a lifelong seeker, I was hoping each of these books would bring me closer to that which I really wasn’t sure I was hoping to find. I knew I was looking for something and I would grow increasingly impatient the deeper I got into these books when I felt it was going to be just another dead end on my spiritual journey. 

Each book was a tangent of sorts, a tangent wrapped in the elevated expectation that THIS book was the one which would deliver me the wisdom I demanded to learn. No pressure, right?

One thing I learned on my meandering journey of life is my impatience consistently created elevated levels of frustration, especially towards myself. The pressure of not finding what I wasn’t Continue reading “The Gift Of Spiritual Impatience” →

The Physics Of Disappointment

The Physics Of Disappointment

Perhaps you, too, have something in common with a tyrannical mythological king?

When you manage to anger the gods, they do manage to come up with some rather unusual punishments. Especially in Greek mythology. Especially if your name is Sisyphus. 

Sisyphus was a tyrannical king whose misguided actions earned him an eternity of rolling an immense stone up a steep hill only to have the stone roll back down the hill as he got close to the top. And when it hit the bottom, once again he’d push that stone back up the hill until it rolled back down yet again. Yes, for eternity. Pushing the same rock up the same hill repeatedly, always with the same results. A rather cruel way to spend the remainder of forever.

I’ve had my share of pushing things up hills. Of pushing rocks up hills only to discover they were the wrong rocks being pushed up the wrong hills. Pushing, hoping that maybe this time the results would be different, that maybe if I simply got better at pushing the wrong situations, relationships, or needed outcomes up the hills of my life this time would finally yield the results I desired.

And they never did. 

Expecting different results from doing the exact same thing never produces different results. The physics of disappointment. Yet how often do we continue to push and hope, forcing what shouldn’t be forced and sentencing ourself to a lifetime of our own self-induced futility in the process.

Often we know we are pushing the wrong rock up the wrong hill, but we continue to push because that’s all we’ve ever known to do. We accept and expect the struggle because it’s always been a struggle, as if some fate we’ve been made to carry as we navigate the challenges of life. 

Sisyphus never controlled his fate. He was given the one stone to continuously push up that one mountain. Forever.

We, though, get to decide what we are willing to push and where we are willing to push it to. And while we may be habitually inclined to keep doing what we’ve always been doing, we simply don’t have to keep doing what habitually has never worked.

It doesn’t have to be a struggle.

Maybe it’s time to stop pushing those wrong stones up those wrong hills?

Photo by Valeriia Miller on Unsplash

A Fully Lived Life Is Much Better

A Fully Lived Life Is Much Better

I’m not sure how much I’ve spent on books. I’ve got lots of them. Bookcases full of them. Many inspiring and informative books filled with great insights and ideas. Many of those books I’ve started and, well, not quite finished. Usually because I found yet another book which caught my distracted eye.

Audiobooks and podcasts? Yup, I enjoy plenty of those as well.

Sometimes I feel like a collector of wisdom, a curator of knowledge, especially in the area of personal growth. Like I’m creating a library of incredible knowledge with the power to change the trajectory of my life.

If I actually did more than simply collect and consume information.

Collecting knowledge feels like you’re doing something. Like, you’re making progress, getting yourself prepared to someday Continue reading “A Fully Lived Life Is Much Better” →