Monday, January 31, 2011

Reflections on 2010, by Gail Earl

For the first time, I felt something different after Christmas. Every year ends with Christmas and I'm usually exhausted but not emotionally wiped out. This year I feel that abundance is dictating our everyday lives. There is just too much of everything. I'm feeling very compelled to make a clear and decisive change. I want to be conscious on a daily basis, of all the excess around me. I feel a nagging urge to be more present in an authentic life. I'm feeling a need that I'm not exactly sure of just how to fill.

I want to be more aware of the time spent on the "quest," rather than the prize. I think I need to step out of my body and my mind and look at my life, and the time that I've been given on this earth. I want to make a daily effort to step back and slow life down.I want to be more aware of the life I've been given and how I spend those days, hours and minutes.
I absolutely love my life, but at the end of this year, I feel I have been selfish with it. I want to do more.

4 comments:

  1. Your sentiments echo my own. Time seemed to go by "soooo" slow when we were young(er). When I was sixteen I wanted to be eighteen, and when I was eighteen, I wanted to be twenty-one. Now I can get up early and go to bed late and still I haven't enough time to do all that I'd like to get accomplished.
    There is a wonderful chapter in Anne Morrow's book, Gift from the Sea that speaks to this plight that you so eloquently write about here.
    "Mechanically women have gained in the last generation, but spiritually we have unwittingly lost. In other times women had in their livies more forces which centered them whether or not they realized it;sources which nourished them-their very seclusion in the home gave them time alone. Many of their duties were conducive to a quiet contemplative drawing of the self. They had more creative tasks to perform. Nothing feeds the center so much as creative work, even humble kinds like cooking, sewing, baking bread,putting up preserves,teaching and singing to children must have been far more nourishing than being the family chaufeur. Our daily modren life does not prepare us for contemplation. A number of mechanical aids saves time and energy. We have more possessions which we have not the time to use or appreciate, more diversons...actually burdens our life. Morrow wrote this more than 50yrs ago. I guess somethings never change.

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  2. Dear Gail,

    I hear what you're saying about the excesses in our lives and your need to step back and slow down. I feel this way too but powerless to change the busyness of modern life. However, I take at least 20 minutes every day for relaxation and contemplation and this works wonders for me.

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  3. Gail, I believe what you are saying is that "there must be more than this" Solomom came to this same conclusion when he wrote Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Materialism soon becomes empty and void of the real meaning for what we have been created for and that is to fear God and serve him, for this is the whole of man, the root of our character, and the foundation of our happiness.

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  4. Not only a great post by Gail, but wonderful, reflective comments by others. I think you hit a chord here, Gail.

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