Today's Meditation:
"To be free from anxieties." This sounds like a very difficult goal to reach, one that millions would love to achieve, but few do. After all, doesn't life throw us many reasons to be anxious every day of our lives?
I suppose that depends upon how we see what comes our way, and how we approach our lives. I believe that if we do understand our duties--and understand the fact that they should be self-determined--we'll spend our lives trying to fulfill those duties. Once our focus is on what we're doing right now, our cares about the future will lessen, for we're concerned with the task at hand, not the tasks that may or may not be at hand tomorrow.
Many people have had businesses fail, thinking it's a great tragedy, only to find that by losing their business, they've had other, more fulfilling doors open up. So why worry that your business may fail next year? If it does, you'll move on to something else, from which you'll learn completely different--and even more valuable--lessons.
I've figured out what I want to do with my life for the time being, and I'm doing it. I'm not worrying about money that I've lost or that I won't be making over the next year. I know that I like where I am today, and I have some things that I have to do today. I'll focus on them and try to make them as positive as I can, and if I can enjoy the present by doing that, then I can help myself to avoid worrying about what may come next week or next year. The "true felicity of life" comes from a series of decisions on our part concerning how we approach life and how we react to it, not as a result of our reactions to things that happen around us in life.
Questions to consider:
Have you defined your "duties to God and other people" based on your own unique talents and passions?
How can focusing on the present help to keep you from feeling anxiety?
Do you have a dependence on the future? Why? How might you work your way out of it?
For further thought:
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly
at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Thomas Carlyle
Today's quotation:
The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and
perturbations; to understand and do our duties
to God and other people, and to enjoy the present
without any serious dependence on the future.
Seneca
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