Gentle reader, this morning I am extending to you ‘An Invitation’ to stop, step-back, reflect and perhaps write about or converse with another about what emerges from within you during the reflective process. Recently I have been reflecting upon a number of topics: change, the aging process, letting go, love, and new beginnings (to name a few of the topics). In order to help you accept my invitation this morning I will provide you with a number of quotations.
I believe that you will find one or more of them reflectively stimulating or they might motivate you to find other quotations or passages that would help you engage in a process that I call ‘deep reflection.’ The following are listed in no particular order although you will notice some common themes.
It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women – a new job, a new town, a divorce – which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; [these inner changes are] something by which they are so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves. –Nadine Gordimer
Dis-eases always attack us when we are confronted by change. –R.W. Smith
There is a time for departure, even when there’s no certain place to go. –Tennessee Williams
The Great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, reminds us how challenging/difficult it is to ‘let go’ of our ‘truths’ or ‘conclusions,’ or ‘assumptions,’ etc. Tolstoy writes: I know that most [people], including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born, when we die, although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. –Erich Fromm
Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. . . Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition. –Florida Scott-Maxwell
Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending. –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When things reach maturity, they decay of themselves. –Lao Tzu
I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. –Joanna Field
For one human being to love another: That is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. –Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. –Rainer Maria Rilke
Journeys finish when the white whale is finally encountered or when the Joads get to California or when Odysseus gets back to Ithaca: That is, they finish when the goal has been reached. And yet, it always turns out, the goal was only an external representation for some inner place, some state that the journeying person needs to attain. In the language of ‘going somewhere,’ journeys tell us about the unnamable ‘nowhere’ that is not a place but a way of being. –William Bridges
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote “Not Transferable’ and ‘Good for This Trip Only’ on these garments. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear. . . It’s like being in between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to. –Marilyn Ferguson
To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still under the spell and he who has never felt the spell are equally incompetent. –Amiel
We neither get better or worse as we get older, but more like ourselves. –Robert Anthony
We convince by our presence. –William James
Few are guilty, but all are responsible. –Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
The enemy of life is indifference. –Elie Wiesel
Here is the world. Beautiful and Terrible. Things will happen. Don’t be afraid. –Frederick Buechner
Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart. . . And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. –Rainer Maria Rilke
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. –T.S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’