Is it too late to start over?

What happens if we should begin again and do not? One thing is sure: the risks of not pursuing our deepest gifts, our strongest passions, our need for higher purpose in life also are serious, not only for ourselves but for those around us as well, whose happiness quotient will be affected by our own. Frustration with what is, the ennui that develops in the face of what has never been, and the sense of emptiness that comes from leaving behind part of ourselves that could have been pursued but was not, are serious breaches of life.

Obviously there is a public risk in allowing ourselves to grow slowly, steadily into the resolution of the self, but there is even worse risk if we attempt to ignore it. Frustration triggered more by what is missing in life than by what we are dealing with there saps our energy for anything else. We get irritable with others. We get even more disgusted with the self in us that we have learned to dislike. Inertia fills the space where love of life used to be. Emptiness colors and smothers everything we attempt to do.

Clearly, “It’s too late for that now” is too great a burden to bear. When is it too late to start over? Never. Not as long as we are alive and seeking even more out of life. Beethoven, deaf as stone, knew that and went on composing long after he could hear what he wrote.

Life is lived in stages. Everything in one stage is simply a prelude to the next, where the lessons will be even more life-giving than before and past learning will take on new value.

“We are always beginning to live,” the Roman poet Manilius wrote in the first century, “but are never living.” We are always becoming, never at any given moment totally and finally complete. The only answer, then, to the question of whether we should start over again is to do what we must in every stage and be ready, when the time comes, to go on living fully in the next one.

–from Following the Path: The Search of a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy by Joan Chittister

Testing the mettle of the self

Dailiness tests the mettle of the self. The ability to go back to the same task, day after day—taking care of the children, doing the shopping, hawking a product, stacking the shelves—with new attention to the task, with new concern for the outcome, takes a special kind of faith, another kind of trust.
 
It’s learning to bring your whole self to something that makes the difference between a happy life and a dull life, a holy life and an empty one.

Life is not made up of crises; life is made up of little things we love to ignore in order to get on to the exciting things in life. But God is in the details. God is what it takes in us to be faithful to them. God is in the routines that make us what we are. The way we do the little things in life is the mark of the bigness of our souls.

It’s when we go on in the heat of the noonday sun that we know what it’s like to walk the dusty roads of Galilee. It’s when we go on without firecrackers or music that we understand what the desert is like. It’s when we go on despite the fact that quitting would be more satisfying that we know that God has taken control of our lives. Then, we are being used for something greater than ourselves.
Dailiness is the great deep pit out of which the character of our lives takes its most lasting shape. It is the repository of our greatest graces and site of our worst losses. It is the treasure house of all our yesterdays and the reserve out of which we draw strength for all our tomorrows.

(Joan Chittister- Called to question)

A Place Called "Home"

In each of us there is a place where we go in the middle of chaos to escape from the fray. It is that “home” place, that hiding place, that soft place where no memories of it come with ragged edges and no thought of it is tinged with fear. It’s an empty beach, perhaps. Or a hidden place on the bluff above town where we remember being able to see everything while no one could see us.

It is the place of our dreams and the hope of our hopes.

It’s that place to which we return in our minds to change life in the middle of too much life for us to take just then.

It’s that natural place within us where the roar of the water or the silence of the mountains or the warmth of the desert or the moss of the swamp soothes our souls and makes us feel human again, at one with the universe again, in control again.

Whatever it is, wherever it is, it calms us and makes us new again.