More on Getting Real
Category: Unitarian Universalism - General
To follow-up on yesterday’s post about searching for what is “real” in our lives, let me draw your attention to “Wake Up and Go To Sleep.” This post by Unitarian Universalist minister W. Frederick Wooden, on his blog Aside from the Obvious, describes a moment of waking-up to reality. Wooden writes:
The whole point of this blog is to wake up. I think most of us phone it in, spiritually. It’s hard not to. Life is full of stuff, and having to pay actual attention to it all is impossible. We end up multi-tasking, which is really ignoring with more gestures; or going on auto-pilot.
But writing absolutely requires that I think about what I am doing. Perhaps not at exactly the moment it happens, but soon enough. No question, I am more awake than I was.
And no one said being awake always felt good either. Like what happened today. Nothing big. No drama, just a moment of recognition.
I won’t give away what it is that wakes Wooden up—go read the rest of this lovely post!
July 26th, 2007 14:28
The oldest cliche in the book is to quote what Thoreau famously said: “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
We can be idealistic and put our activist hats on: pointing fingers, levying blame, and decrying this fact and we might feel better for the short term. But in the long term, the only people we can really change are ourselves.
I worry sometimes about the fact that opiates have become the religion of the masses. Many of us believe that we have a right to feel good all the time. That’s totally unrealistic. As the Bible teaches, there is a season to everything and with life will come pain.
Life will sometimes be good, but it will never be fair.
And having said that, I’ve come to the point that I’m in control of the way I respond to the world. It can be a very bad place or a very good place. And I for one resolve to laugh more, obsess less about things I cannot change, and focus on the things that are really important like family and community.
July 27th, 2007 13:52
“I for one resolve to laugh more, obsess less about things I cannot change, and focus on the things that are really important like family and community.” — Amen to that!