Hey, it's still Friday on the left coast. ;)
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In my view, quiet is not a place. It's not a cabin in the woods, or a house by the lake. It's not an absence of noise, the TV and radio off, the kids asleep or out of the house. It's a disciplined state of mind that I've rarely been able to achieve and that only recently. It's being able to follow someone else's train of thought without inserting your own, it's praying without your mind wandering, it's praying with someone else without your mind wandering...which is definitely the harder of the two. But we don't do discipline anymore. We don't want to take every thought captive. We want to entertain every fleeting idea, even if it means a lack of quiet in our minds. In today's society we pay top dollar to drive to a fancy retreat to have some quiet, but it is only temporary if we do not back it up with the mental discipline it takes to quiet our minds. It's not an easy thing to do, this sort of discipline. I have such a very difficult time with it, but I keep reminding myself of the peace that comes with it, the focus, and I know it's definitely worth it.
Visual aid:
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Read the others, or join in, here.
Illustration of your point: I had to keep brining my eyes back to to your text because there was the entertaining visual aid at the bottom of the screen, and there were your cute kids on the side-bar.
ReplyDeleteI love how you emphasize that quiet is not just an absence of noise, or even an absence of thought, but an intentional turning of the mind in a certain direction. I definitely struggle with that two.
Glad I got to share these five minutes of "quiet" with you!