MAKING DECISIONS

Most of us have weak decision-making muscles. We do not realize what it means to make a real decision. We fail to recognize the force of change that a truly congruent, committed decision makes.

The word "decision" comes from Latin roots, with de meaning "down" or "away from" and caedere meaning "to cut." Therefore, a decision means cutting from any other possibility. A true decision means you are committed to achieving a result and cutting yourself off from any other possibility.

Committed decisions show up in two places: your calendar and your bank account. No matter what you say you value, or even think your priorities are, you have only to look at last year's calendar and bank account to see the decisions you have made about what you truly value.

See how you have reserved your time. Look at your expenditures. Those are the trails to the decisions you have made.

Carole Hildebrand

TO BE ALWAYS RELEVANT

To be always relevant, we must speak eternal things.

Simone Weil

EAT SLOWLY

Eat at a local restaurant tonight.
Get the cream sauce.
Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar.
Go somewhere you’ve never been.
Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you.
Order the steak rare.
Eat an oyster.
Have a negroni.
Have two.
Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways.
Eat slowly.
Tip your server.
Check in on your friends.
Check in on yourself.
Enjoy the ride.

Anthony Bourdain

HOW WE SPEND OUR DAYS

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.

Annie Dillard

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ATHEISM

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

David Foster Wallace

WALKING IN WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are walking in what we are looking for.

James Finley

TRANSFORMATION BEGINS WITH INTERRUPTION

Transformation always begins in the form of interruption or disruption.

Keith Matthews

I ASKED FOR WONDER

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

DISTRACTION

Life presents an endless series of interruptions and distractions. 

When your day is interrupted or your progress stalls, it's easy for your mindset to collapse as well. You may feel guilty for not following through on what you intended to do. But you are not guilty, you are human. 

Everyone gets distracted. In many ways, the real divide is between those who get back on track quickly and those who let interruptions expand into longer periods of inactivity. 

Top performers get back on track faster than most. This is the skill to develop. You will be interrupted, but you can choose to keep it brief.

James Clear

HABITS FOR THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a person's life is made up of nothing but the habits they accumulated during the first half.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

VOCATION

It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.  

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-Interest.  

By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either. 

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. 

Frederick Buechner

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking