• But it’s morning. Within my hand is another day. Another day to listen and love and walk and glory. I am here for another day.
 I think of those who aren’t.
• I sometimes wonder if the “dead†are not more present, more comfort, more here than most of the living.
• Today I want to do things to be doing them, not to be doing something else. I don’t want to walk to get there, make love to have climaxes, or study to “keep abreast.â€
 Today I don’t want to live for, I want to live.
• My prayer is: I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE, I WILL DO WHAT I WILL DO.
o All I want to do, need to do is stay in rhythm with myself. All I want is to do what I do & not try to do what I don’t do. Just do what I do. Just keep pace with myself. Just be what I will be.
o I will be what I will be – and I am now what I am. Here is where I will devote my energy. My power is with me, not with tomorrow. I will work in rhythm with myself, not with what I “should†be. And to work in rhythm with myself I must stay deeply connected to myself. Tomorrow is shallow, but today is as deep as truth.
 God revealed his name to Moses, and it was – I AM WHAT I AM.
• I’m convinced that this anxiety running through my life is the tension between what I “should be†and what I am. My anxiety doesn’t come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it. It seems to begin whenever I smuggle into my mind an expectation about how I or other should be. It is the tension between my desire to control the world and the recognition that I can’t. “I will be what I will be†– where is the anxiety in that?
o Anxiety is the recognition that I might not reach the rung on the opinion-ladder I have just set for myself. I fear death most when I am about to exceed what I believe others think of me; then death threatens to cut me off from myself, because “myself†is not yet.
• Deep inner awareness of what I have done and what my motives were can change me. But confession, confrontation, and even spoken forgiveness often get other people entangles in the net of my problem and hinder their freedom as well as complicate mine.
• When I get to where I can enjoy just laying on the rug picking up lint balls – I will no longer be too ambitious.
• I’m holding this cat in my arms so it can sleep, and what more is there.
• There is a part of me that wants to write, a part that wants to theorize, a part that wants to draw, a part of me that wants to teach…
 To force myself into a single role, to decide to be just one thing in life, would kill off large parts of me.
• “Next time I will…â€
“From now on I will…â€
~What makes me think I am wiser today than I will be tomorrow?
• Boredom or discontent is useful to me when I acknowledge it and see clearly my assumption that there is something else I would rather be doing. In this way boredom can act as an invitation to freedom by opening me to new options and thoughts. For example, If I can’t change the activity -Can I look at it more honestly?
• The more I consult my deeper feelings throughout the day, the more I fall back into that place of quiet knowing to see if what I am doing is what I want to be doing, then the less I feel at the end of the day that I have been wasting time. Perhaps the waste was never in the activities themselves but in my pulling forth too petty a justification for doing them.
• Discouragement, if pursued, is the exercise of an opinion: to turn from creative to noncreative mental activity, to turn from what is present to what is over, to turn from that which builds to that which destroys. By becoming conscious of the option my mood sets before me, I am free to decline it.
• As I look back on my life, one of the most constant and powerful things I have experienced is the desire to become more than I am at the moment – an unwillingness to let my mind remain in the pettiness where it idles – a desire to increase the boundaries of my self – a desire to feel more, learn more, express more – a desire to grow, improve, purify, expand. I used to interpret this inner push as meaning that there was some one thing out there that I wanted to do, or be, or have. And I have spent too much of my life trying to find it. But now I know that this energy within me is seeking more than the mate or the profession or the religion, more even than pleasure or power or meaning. It is seeking more of me; or better, it is, Thank God, releasing more of me.
• Perfectionism is slow death. Idols and ideals are based on the past. If everything were to turn out just as I would want it to, just as I would plan, I would never experience anything new. My life would be an endless repetition of stale success. When I make a mistake I experience something unexpected.
• I sometimes react to mistakes as if I have betrayed myself. My fear of them seems to arise from the assumption that I am potentially perfect and that if I can just be very careful I will not fall from heaven. But a mistake is a declaration of the way I am now, a jolt to the expectations I have unconsciously set, a reminder I am not dealing with the facts. When I have listened to my mistakes I have grown.
• When I see I am doing it wrong, a part of me wants to keep on doing it the same way and even starts looking for reasons to justify the continuation. And no one can tell me better – not even me!
• Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes and I am left the same as I began. The more things change the more I am the same. It appears that my life is a constant irony of maturity and regression, but my sense of progress is base4d on the illusion that things out there are going to remain the same and that, at last, I have gained a little control. But there will never be means to end, only means. And I am means. I am what I started with, and when it is all over I will be all that is left of me.
• The comment, “Don’t mind him, he’s got a problem†illustrates this universal attitude toward personal difficulty. The implication is that having a problem is a strange and avoidable weakness. When I come in repeated contact with this daily façade of normality I begin to assume that I too deserve such a life, and I get annoyed with the present and look upon my difficulties as unjust. And because I assume there is something unnatural about my having a problem, I too attempt to present a problem-free appearance.
• My trouble is I analyze life instead of live it.
• When I outgrow my names and facts and theories, or when reality leaves them behind, something in me begins to die if I don’t continue on toward a broader way of seeing, one in which I look without categorizing, one in which I look.
• Now that I know I’m no miser than anyone else, does this wisdom make me wiser?
• The thoughts, “You’re lucky, it could have been worse…†is the kind of gratitude I can do without. It also could have been better, or, actually, it couldn’t have been any other way then the way it was.
• When I made my fist efforts to be true to myself, I felt trapped in a self I didn’t like. I thought I was stuck with the emotions I had, that I couldn’t change them, and shouldn’t try to even if I could. I saw many selfish, cowardly, even cruel feelings that I didn’t want, and yet believed that I had to express them if I were going to be myself. I was failing to see that expressing a feeling is how I am to others, not how I am to myself. Not wanting to express negative feelings is also a feeling, a part of me, and if it is the greater part, I will be truer to myself be not expressing them.
• I have to become conscience of my desire to hurt before I can become conscious of my desire not to hurt. Most mistakes are corrected through increased awareness, which usually does not come without some discomfort.
• If, on the other hand, I avoid my urge to hurt, or try to act nice in spite of it, the urge grows. To ignore my feelings is to condemn myself for having them, and it’s as if the rejected part of me reacts by getting nasty!
o Unless I accept my faults, I will unquestionably doubt my virtues.
 If love is at the core of us, we can add love to any misery we feel.
• It’s not that we fear the place of darkness - but that we don’t think we are worth the effort to find the place of light.
 Forgiveness is the willingness to begin – Guilt is the love of staying stuck
• I was just asked to go somewhere. I said, “I can’t. I have to meet someone.†Clearly, I was not accepting responsibility for my actions. Next time I want to be more honest and state that I do what I do because I want to do it.
• The injunction to be unselfish refers only to one sense of self. I certainly know what it’ like to be preoccupied and uncaring, yet I am also conscious of a deep desire to treat others feelings as my own. Each of us is selfish in the sense that we are always doing what some part of us wants. Generosity feels at least as rewarding as greed. Selfishness is neither good nor bad – it depends on the way we are selfish as to whether it nourishes us or injures.
• Fear is static that prevents me from hearing my intuition.
• Anxiety, fear, panic, is running away mentally, not physically. There is something over there in the corner of my mind, some thought, some image, that I don’t want to look at. Fear is based on the belief that I am safer not seeing, like a child closing it’s eyes as the ball comes toward it. Awareness is the first step to freeing the mind. I must not only hear the fear out but question it closely as to the answer it is suggesting. Just as with a nightmare, most fears will fall by the weight of their own nonsense – once they are bluntly seen.
• Wanting to do something is a desire, not a sentence. When I “decide†what I want, I translate my desire into a sentence, and then follow the sentence; I take the desire out of my heart and put it into my ego. Asking myself, “What should I do?†brings to mind my habitual answers to that question, it bring in what the voices from my past would want me to do, and it ignores the fact that there are probably no adequate words to describe where my heart is leading me this instant.
• Being myself includes taking risks with myself, taking risks on new behavior, trying new ways of thinking and being, so I can come to know how it feels to walk hand-in-hand with myself.
 “If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing – then the desire is not to write†- Hugh Prather in Notes To Myself
• There is no way to know which future course is best because there is no way to foresee all those my decision will affect and how it will affect them, and to attempt to force my mind to reach certainty only assures that it will not. Yet it’s always possible to know what I believe would be best, because belief is found in the present. My task, therefore, is not to, “see my way through,†but merely to discover my deepest preference.
• To listen to my intuition is to identify with my entire awareness, to be my entire experience, and not just my conscious perception. My total awareness synthesizes into a calm sense of direction that is above reason.
• It is sometimes said that each of us is ultimately alone. That idea is compelling not because of birth and death but because so often our moments alone are much more true, more real. The word “GOD†only begins to have meaning for me when I am alone. Or if not alone, so at one with another that there is no sense of a competing reality. God has no meaning for me in a discussion. I don’t think religion is an attainable subject for the intellect. I can only believe when I’m not talking about it.
• I need solitude like I need food and rest, and like eating and resting, solitude is most healing when it fits the rhythm of my needs. A rigidly scheduled aloneness does not nourish me.
• The tools of the mind can be wrongly used – But the mind possesses no wrong tools.
• I am noticing that when I am bored I think I am tired of my surroundings but I am really tired of my thoughts. It is trite, repetitious, unobserved thinking that is producing the discontent. Adopting a quiet awareness, a kind of listening attitude, usually freshens my mind and brings the situation I am into life.
• It is 4:20 and it is NOW
~Wendel James Potter (Comedian)
1 week of art work
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