JUST MAYBE, STRIVING IS OVERRATED

Two things have been itching at me this week.  One got started as I read several biographies of Magaret Fuller a Transcendental  type who lived in Concord MA.  Good friend of Emerson and Thoreau.  A great feminist intellectual.  Look her up.    And given how hard she worked and pushed herself for moral and intellectual improvement she should be known.  She was a relentless pioneer.

AND she died in a ship accident  coming back to the US after being in Italy working as a newspaper correspondent.  With her  Italian man (not husband--not this feminist) and new baby.  The ship went down 200 yards from the US coast near  Fire Island but Margaret didn't know how to swim.  I should have only read one biography.  All that striving and she didn't know how to swim.  And she had just begun to enjoy.  Italy is a great lesson in enjoyment..

The other thing that was scratchy for me all week was the titles of invitations to various on-line workshops that plague me.  I decided to get them off my computer.   Get rid of  the too many opportunities to ensure me that I Have the Love of My Life,  that My Body is Ready for Perfection that I Know and Grow My Soul into Glory,  that I Write the Best Transformational Book of All Time, and that My Marketing Social Platform Will Trump All Others.  We swim in superlatives.  Reading them all together I felt both like I was some hot potato and then lazy as hell for not being  thin, famous and spiritually evolved.

Here is what gave me great pleasure, relief and goose bumps of truth.
A quote of Thomas Merton:

"We tend to think that we live at every moment amid unlimited hopes.  There is nothing we
cannot have if we try hard enough.  Only in solitude, when accurate limitations are seen and accepted, does a new dimension open up.  It is called the PRESENT AND IS, IN FACT, UNLIMITED."

Oh yeah.  Breath that  in.

We have trend ourselves to think that we live at every moment amid 'UNLIMITED HOPES."  THERE IS NOTHING WE CANNOT HAVE IF WE TRY HARD ENOUGH, OR LOOK IN THE RIGHT PLACE FOR IT. In solitude,  when accurate limitations are seen and accepted a new dimension opens up.  It is called the present and is in fact, unlimited.  Unless we place the burden of future expectations and hopes or regrets on it in order to live with this burdensome present. "

 And that is the lesson for 67 years.  The present is the place to drink every drop of life that is left.