Sunday Journal, 456 words
Life Gets Our Attention
By Dalton Roberts
IPS Features
The
spiritual Light of life is always shining and will shine through the smallest
cracks in our lives. It shines exactly as much or as little light into our being
as we open ourselves to experience.
From my clear experience, when we open ourselves we get experiences of
confirmation. We get guidance. If I knew nothing else about spiritual matters, I
would know that because when I got ready for confirmation and guidance, it came.
If we decide we don't want spiritual light then life gets our attention at times
in ways that are not always pleasant. It happened to a friend of mine on this
date in 1989 and I wrote in my journal: "If we have openings in our lives,
Spirit will use them. If we do not create them, Spirit has to burn bushes, knock
us off our camels with a blinding light, or write on our walls."
SOLITUDE AND LONELINESS
I
have a friend who lives alone and is miserable. I have another friend who lives
alone and loves it. Both are alone but experience it in entirely different ways.
How can the lonely ones transform their loneliness into solitude? It seems to be
a natural thing for some people to enjoy being alone. Those with introspective
personalities do best at it. But we are all much more capable of learning than
we realize and the simple truth is that we can learn to enjoy solitude.
I have written many times of my own experience with meditation so I will not
repeat myself but I will say when I got to the place of actually loving my daily
quiet time, solitude became much more of a friend. How to meditate is a subject
requiring some time and space but at the risk of oversimplifying it, you are
meditating anytime you get pleasurably lost in what you are doing or not doing.
I fussed at an old pal for not writing a book he'd often talked about before his
retirement. After about a year he said, "I may never write it. I have
enjoyed the pure pleasure of doing absolutely nothing."
Believe it or not, some people are miserable doing nothing. However, this does
not mean they cannot learn to love solitude. A good starting point is to sit
down and list all the good times you've had when alone. Maybe it was trying a
new recipe. Reading a book. Watching the rain. Playing solitaire. Strumming your
guitar. Writing a poem.
The list is endless, bounded only by your own imagination. It may take some
adjusting and a little time in experimentation, but you can change painful
loneliness into joyous solitude.
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