⭐⭐⭐⭐
I had different expectations for this book. If you ask me, Brackett's subject is something different than "rest." Miriam-Webster defines it as "cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength," and I think Bracket's subject could better be described as "finding and maintaining sustainable balance" or something. But it was written in the 19th century so I'll try not to be so fussy. More importantly, she has some great things to say!
Chapter 1- Rest
She opens by describing the duties of a housewife, which are "multifarious and never-ending" (2). "The more humble and the more in earnest she grows, the more weary she gets, till she lives in a perpetual sense of not being able to draw one full breath. Many a woman will recognize the truth of these words, though it will seem to most men that they are exaggerated" (3). ((chuckle!))
"Peace and rest are the characteristics of the home. But it should not only be a peace which is a stifled war, and the Rest must come from the constant balance of complicated conditions, yielding at every side with a certain compensating movement, so that it shall yet be firm and supporting" (5). This is a goal we should have and for which we should fight! It is difficult, but women are suited to it, they are agile and can multi-task, and with more information & education on how to do it well ((this book)), "and she will free herself from the coils which render her breathing difficult, and find herself able to create a home without, in doing it, sacrificing herself. But in order to do this, she must work from within, outward; she must create within herself the strength which shall be equal to that pressing upon her from without. For it is only in a balance of forces that rest consists" (6). What we long for is the "harmony of demand and supply" (6) so that as the situation changes, we can change to suit it, like a sewing machine that can make the same sized stitches despite changes in tension. We do not long for rest as an "absolute do-nothingness" (6), like the woman whose epitaph ends "Oh nothing, sweet nothing forever!" because she was so exhausted. "It is doubtless true that Nirvana offers great attractions to many women, and that the preacher who would strive to lead them by picturing heaven as a place of continual activity is misdirecting his efforts" (8). ((Hah!)) Great insight on "the continual drudgery of dressing and undressing, which necessarily forms so large a part of the duties of every day, and which, whenever we become conscious of it, is so wearily tiresome" (9). ((So true. I'm tired now thinking about it.)) But that is what death is for. In life, as previously stated, the days are about balancing "the inside and the outside conditions of life" (9). She wisely points out that this can happen by one or the other must be turned up or down, "And this tuning cannot be done once for all, but must be a continual care" (9). Even giving something a name can give rest, as can creating creeds and laws and treaties-- but even these are being constantly amended. "the history of the world is only a story of perpetual revision in one region or another" (11). "Whether in large or in small affairs, there must be perpetual readjustment" (12).
"Where the harmony between the inner desire and the outside circumstances does not exist--in other words, where there is no rest--the question to be settled first of all is which of the two is to be changed... The thoughtless person goes blindly to work, changing the first condition that presents itself to view, though the fact that it does so present itself may be a mere accident" (13). "If you decide, after a careful review of all the outside circumstances, that they cannot be altered, then your task is to mould your own mind into harmony with these conditions" (14). This is a "perpetually active process" (15). Getting some time and distance between you and your problems helps: "Try in the freedom of your mind to withdraw from them by never so little a space, and the crossing and tangled lines will begin to weave into some kind of order" (15).
Then right after-- "Necessity--that is, God and His world, the whole of it--stands outside of you. Within you, you have the freedom which God has given. It is your business to reconcile that necessity and that freedom, since it is only in such reconciliation that Rest can be found. Find it!" (15).
"Over and over again, Rest consists simply in producing harmony between the individual and her surroundings or the conditions under which she has to live. This harmony must be created by herself, for when God created us in His own image He could not do otherwise than to make us active agents, and to ordain that if we wanted anything, we must get it for ourselves. You cannot teach the child by forcing facts upon him; so long as you do this, they remain foreign to him. It is only the knowledge that he himself takes in and assimilates till it becomes part of his being that goes towards his education. He himself must reach out actively for it or it can never become his. It is so with Rest" (16). Rest is all around us, we need to "reach out and take it" (20), and first we must realize that it is right there-- like fish realizing that the sea is right there.
"Resignation is not merely a passive state. It is an intensely active one in which the soul is standing on tiptoe 'with arms out-stretched and eager face ablaze.'...We are not Orientals, and Allah is not the name of our God. The freedom the Orient has never known and can never know if ours, but only for a great price, and that price, our own effort....You must have trust in Someone else than yourself, and a in a wiser Sight than your own. If you have not this trust, you must fight for it till you win it. Sometimes the people who claim to love God most, trust Him least" (21-23).
"It is the results which we have garnered that are of consequence to us, not the steps by which we attained them. It is what we are, not what we have done, or what any one else has done, that concerns us. If our lives have been worth anything, they have given us some degree of insight, which his only a sort of mental instinct telling us at once what to do under certain conditions" (26-27). "It seems possible that the gathered and assorted experiences of our lives here are to become the instincts of our live hereafter--the instincts with which we shall start on that new life" (28). "After all, every day which seems so long and so hard to us is only a part of the whole, and not a whole in itself; and many a trouble and vexation, many a thing hard to bear and difficult to manage, will lose much of its importance in our eyes if we can stop to remember that tit is only a part of a whole which we cannot see, and a component of a smaller whole--the life given to us" (31).
Chapter 2- Necessity
The duties of a woman are many, and her days are full of laborious tasks without breaks or variation. The more modern conveniences come along to help, the more there is to do. "We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares" (43). The work of keeping house is never ending, as soon as you finish in one area of focus, you realize another needs tending to. "We are always getting ready to live, and never having time enough to live" (42).
This is all so overwhelming. "To our own power of invention, therefore, we must turn if we would not be overcome" (45). Ideas:
--"increasing the elasticity of our income," by patching, finding new uses for old things instead of buying something new, and planning in order to buy things out of season when prices are lower. This can be exhausting, but "planning comes next to creating, and to create is essentially the part of woman" (48). "There would not have been so much pleasure in the Creation if it had not bee preceded by chaos. To overcome difficulty is pleasure, because it gives always a sense of power, than which there is nothing more agreeable" (49). So, in regards to income, we should aim to "overcome the necessity which confronts us, without own freedom of invention" (49).
--"To secure time for all we do, we must offset the rapidity of its flight by reducing as many of our actions as possible to automatism" (49). "The only wise way for us is to hand over as many little things as possible to the care of automatism, and to conquer monotony by bringing larger and more fruitful interests into our minds and the space left thus free" (66). Training ourselves to do this makes us move faster, and saves our mental energies for things that are more pleasant, and work is less "wearying" (50). "To have our thinking set free from the common, every-day affairs of daily life, is the very thing we are most earnestly striving towards" (51). She uses the example of learning to walk becoming automatic. "As long as the house is well organized, and the daily work running its habitual grooves, it runs itself, so to speak" (53). "What we learn for the sake of knowledge, we hold; what we learn for the sake of accomplishing some ulterior end, we forget as soon as that end has been gained" (59).
--Having a planner is a good way to use these facts to our benefit in accomplishing the goal of time efficiency. ((pp 59-64- I think she's talking about bullet journaling. NO, it's actually something called "The Standard Diary"-- still make them today. -https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/01/the-daily-planner-american-history/WncDRG5hq7B9m0w3cE5jkM/story.html- But Bullet Journalling is better.)) "It is largely the constant making of decisions that tires us" (64). ((YES!! See: The Power of Habit.)) "It can never be often enough repeated that it is the constant succession of little things and small anxieties that wear upon us, not the great things" (66). "It is always a positive gain of time to make our plans beforehand and in quiet, when we can see clearly. It is like taking directions from Philip sober instead of from Philip drunk, and that saves time and useless work" (67).
--Manage your home with detailed planning and anticipation. The importance of giving clear, detailed directions to servants, having the division of work written down and planned in advance is promoted. "The object for her ["the housekeeper"] is the quietness, order, and comfort of the house, and the servants are only a means to this end" (68). "If we are not the possessors of an instinct for order, we must create and diligently cultivate it" (70). "Go on, patiently putting and keeping outside things in order, and you will find that after awhile, you are beginning to gain a mental grip of the problems which beset you" (75). "You are not able to think clearly and logically in a room where everything is in confusion" (76).
--Keep your inner world at peace by keeping your body from expelling needless energy-- fidgeting, asking questions that have answers which don't concern you. She preaches maintaining inward order by first keeping the body still. "Learn to keep still, and you will feel the quieting influence all through your life" (77). "No one can tell how much of the beautiful serenity of the Quakers comes from the outward stillness and quiet of their worship" (78). "After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey will reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who 'fuss' continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use" (80). She describes how to walk up the stairs in a way that conserves energy. "Take care of yourself in such little ways as these. Try in every way to acquire a habit of quietness" (81).
--These things are ways to take care of yourself, to prevent draining of your "nerve force." She has much to say for prevention of this, and how to treat it if needed. "Help yourself out of the stores of aid which he has provided for you from the foundation of the world. And if you must have tonics, take those also from Him, in sunshine, pure air, exercise, regular hours, healthful food, and, above all perhaps, in sleep. Religiously avoid all others. It is vain hoping to restore nerve-power by the recourse to medicine" (82). "What you have done by a long series of drafts upon your nerve strength, whether necessary or not, can be made up only by a long series of efforts at patience and of will-power to keep yourself still and in the way of recovery" (83). At first this sounds like a rebuttal of medical treatment, which I will try to forgive since there was far less understanding of "maladies which imply or consist in loss of nerve-power, such as suppression gout, hysteria, neuralgia, insomnia, chorea, epilepsy, melancholia, and general loss of mental control" (82) when this book was published in 1892. I imagine that if Anna Brackett was still writing, she would tell us to take advantage of modern medicine. But I think the intention of this section is to avoid thinking of "tonics" (medicine) as panaceas, and to look to easy fixes. (Oh, there are pages and pages to be written about how this fits into mental health: medicine is good in many cases but is never the only aspect of a good treatment plan.)
She ends the chapter with the insight that all of this has been about how to "meet the demands of modern life, and conquer necessity" (86). She closes the chapter by saying we should consider what our main goal is. "Look carefully through all the claims pressing upon you in your complicated life, and decide once and for all what is the one really important and overmastering duty in it, and should be the one dominating aim. Then remember that if you succeed in that, the others, so multifarious, are really no more than the fringe of the garment... What that is for each woman, no other person can decide for her" (87).
Chapter 3- Freedom
What is it that you really, really want? You have the freedom to pursue it. "It is the old story; first make up your mind what you want to do with your life, and then decide the question of dress, as every other question, by that test" (108).
--Beware wanting what you don't have. "There are many things that perhaps you would like to do or like to have; first bear in mind the undoubted truth that there are perhaps only one or two things in the world which are not far more charming in desire than they are in possession" (93). "For pleasure lies in the pursuit, not the attainment" (94).
--Beware wanting what others think you should want. "The truth is that too much, not too little, is taken of the unthinking advice tossed at us every day, often forgotten by the giver" (99). Not that you should never get advice, "But the fact is that there is only one person who can decide a problem, because he is the only one knowing all the conditions, external and internal, and that is the person whose problem it is" (101).
--Don't think you have to read everything just because it's there! "Have always some reason for reading a magazine article or let it alone" (112). ("If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest" (113).
"There can be no work, whatever it may be, that is so exhausting as painful emotion; while on the other hand, mercifully, there is no tonic so upbuilding and renewing as joy, which sets into active exercise every constructive power of the body, and whose rush is like the leap of the books in spring from strong mountain-tops to the lowlands (117). "And there will always be restlessness and fatigue till peace is born of inner freedom" (118).
Chapter 4--Restlessness
Our tendency toward restlessness:
--"The human spirit is always asking after a place where it may stop and build abodes. But so long as it is human--which is the same thing as divine--it must be driven, in spite of its own will, by the impulse to move on to new homes. The fever of migration is contained within its very nature, and it can hope to escape it only for a time" (121).
--"In some places we might feel it a duty to inculcate the need of change and of faster progress, but in the modern American city is certainly not one of these, and there would seem little danger within its walls of laying too much emphasis on the beauty of respose" (124).
--On sleep:
--Talking about lying awake, frustrated, listening to the clock chime and counting down the hours til you have to get up again: "These things are your masters now, not your slaves, and the demon of sleeplessness...is upon you, insisting upon your working without, nay, against your will...The demonic power in you, however, is not demonic, but only a heavenly power perverted, just as all the faults of a child are only unregulated virtues. It is nothing but your own will which has become so strong that you are afraid of it. Do not complain, then, or hesitate to to use your will to keep yourself perfectly quiet at any rate. You can if you only think you can" (134). She suggests getting up and eating something warm. "While you are waiting for sleep to come to you, you will certainly be thinking, probably of the very things which you are most tired of considering; here too, you must use your will to determine the course of your thought, and if it persistently goes back to the avoided topic, you must just as persistently call it away and set it on another track. What that track shall be matters not much, but it must be one of your own choosing" (135). ((Love that. It's a great tip!!! Helped me already. But then the next sentence? "As it is by the will that you have sinned, so it is only by the road of the will that you can obtain remission of the penalties you have brought upon yourself." What?! Just no.))
--For sleeplessness, she suggests thinking through things with reason. "One thing you must not do, and that's... step into the domain of the emotions, and there is no sleep there" (138).
--"It is as much your duty to go to sleep as it is to eat your food" (140).
--"The conclusions formulated with so much pains in the night are seen with the first rays of the sun to be of no value in the day-world, and so gradually you learn to save yourself the labor of working them out" (142).
"In religion the influence which comes to the passive mind--made and held so by the active will--is called Grace, and it is that which will descend upon you in other domains if only you will let it come...The main trouble generally is that by your continual Restlessness you keep your soul in such a state that no influence can come to you from without" (146).
The restlessness of unused potential: "There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind....To see power is wasted is very hard. But really no power is ever wasted in the spiritual kingdom any more than in the material. It is only transmuted and correlated, so that there need never be mourning over a loss which does not exist, and the Restlessness of mourning will thus pass over into Rest" ( 147-149).
The need for focus: "Anything is restless which has not a purpose and hence it is that listlessness breeds Restlessness....How many of us are singing with overtones, and wondering why the life-dust is flying hither and thither, and why there is no rest in it? Suppose we were to sing only one pure tone, and see how quickly it would fall into order and symmetry" (152-153).
Chapter 5--Blue-rose Melancholy
The land of the Blue Rose is what I call the land of "should," or what some might call the land of "If only." "He who has once breathed the perfume of the blue flower has no more peace and quiet in his life, but is driven on and on, though his sore feet pain him, and he yearns to lay down his weary head to rest" (159). Or better, "[a woman who has breathed the blue flower] is always complaining gently that she cannot make her circles squares or her squares circles...She constructs an ideal world out of her own consciousness, and then feels injured because the world around her does not harmonize with it. And thus she falls a victim to the blue-rose melancholy" (161).
One thing that helps is "the tonic of regular work and enough or it, and the wholesome nervous shock which comes from contact with people entirely different from herself" (162-163).
"Only the flowing water is pure and sweet. Only the spinning top and the moving bicycle do not fall over. Rest is not round in irregular and purposeless motion, nor is it in stagnation; all real and firm rest is to be sought in harmonious action" (163). Figuring out how to do this takes practice, but just try! "Go on and make errors, and fall and get up again. Only go on! You will never learn to speak a foreign language if you are afraid of mistakes; so you will never do anything with your own life if you are discouraged by failure. You were made to fail over and over again, or you would never gain any strength. The harder time you have, the gladder you ought to be; for you are getting exercise and experience, and, then, God would never spend so much trouble in training you if you were not worth the effort" (164-165).
A side note: "A taste for the best literature is a blessed gift; if you have it not yet, strive towards it till you acquire it" (168).
"The problem before you is unchangeably and always, no what you 'would do if'--for that is the way the thought of the blue-rose melancholy runs--but what you will do on this particular gloomy day, in this particular room, with the particular people and things that are in it. You have got to play the game with the cards that have been dealt to you, and it is of no use for you to bewail your fate because you don't hold different ones. Look them over, arrange them, and play" (170).
Monday, January 29, 2018
Monday, January 22, 2018
Deep Work by Cal Newport
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jeff Bottoms, who I mostly enjoyed. He seemed to be very interested in what he was saying, (which is the most important trait of a narrator, if you ask me,) but he got a bit too constantly-high-pitched about it at times I thought. 3.5 stars for the narration.
I love these kind of armchair-psychology, life-hack books. They are so interesting and generally helpful. This one was aimed at a particular kind of professional, but I think the applications apply to many, many areas--including my spiritual life!
"Deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate" (Introduction).
"Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not" (Chapter 2).
"As Gallagher summarizes, 'Who you are, what you think feel and do, what you love--is the sum of what you focus on'" (Chapter 3).
"Fredrickson's research shows what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. These simple choices can provide a reset button to your emotions. She provides the example of a couple fighting over inequitable splitting of household chores. Rather than choosing to focus on your partner's selfishness and sloth, she suggests, you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has been aired, which is the first step toward a solution to the problem, and to your improved mood. This seems like a simple exhortation to look on the bright side, but Fredrickson found that skillful use of these emotional "leverage points" can generate a significantly more positive outcome after negative events" (Chapter 3).
"Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spent enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. There is, however, a hidden, but equally important, benefit to cultivating rapt attention in your workday. Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives" (Chapter 3).
"Among many breakthroughs, Csikzentmihalyi's work with ESM [Experience Sampling Method] helped validate a theory he had been developing over the prededing decade: 'The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.' Csikzentmihalyi calls this mental state 'Flow,' a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title. At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed, and still do, that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less, and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikzentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong. 'Ironically,' he writes, 'jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because, like flow activities, they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed'" (Chapter 3).
"Decades of research stemming from Csikzentmihalyi's original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile" (Chapter 3).
"You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit. It's instead like a muscle that tires" (Chapter 4).
The 4 Disciples of the 4DX Framework:
1 Focus on the wildly important.
2 Act on the lead measures
3 Keep a compelling scorecard
4 Accountability
"If the internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment, that's fine. Schedule lots of long internet blocks. The key here isn't to avoid, or even to reduce the amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. One place where this strategy becomes particularly difficult outside work is when you're force to wait. For example, standing in line at a store. It's crucial in these situations that if you're in an offline block, you simply gird yourself for the temporary boredom, and fight through it, with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait, and be bored, has become a novel experience in modern life. But from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable" (Part II - Rule 2).
"...you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing, which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations. Won't a structured evening leave you exhausted, and not refreshed the next day at work? Bennett, to his credit, anticipated this complaint. As he argues, such worries misunderstand what energizes the human spirit. What? You say that full energy given to to those 16 hours will lessen the value of the business 8? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business 8. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity. They do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest, except in sleep. In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind to something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semi-conscious and unstructured web-surfing. To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist" (Rule 3).
"I worried when I first started setting a sender filter, that it would seem pretentious, as if my time was more valuable than that of my readers, and that it would upset people. But this fear wasn't realized. Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication, as they would like to enjoy this same right" (Rule 4).
" ...the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are under-developed. The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there's an expectation that every message requires a timely response, is absurdly unproductive" (Rule 4).
"A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance, and it's not a philosophical statement. It is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester" (Conclusion).
"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Roseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. In Part 1, I quoted write Winifred Gallagher, saying, 'I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.' I agree... and hopefully, now that you've finished this book, you agree too (Conclusion).
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jeff Bottoms, who I mostly enjoyed. He seemed to be very interested in what he was saying, (which is the most important trait of a narrator, if you ask me,) but he got a bit too constantly-high-pitched about it at times I thought. 3.5 stars for the narration.
I love these kind of armchair-psychology, life-hack books. They are so interesting and generally helpful. This one was aimed at a particular kind of professional, but I think the applications apply to many, many areas--including my spiritual life!
"Deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate" (Introduction).
"Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not" (Chapter 2).
"As Gallagher summarizes, 'Who you are, what you think feel and do, what you love--is the sum of what you focus on'" (Chapter 3).
"Fredrickson's research shows what you choose to focus on exerts significant leverage on your attitude going forward. These simple choices can provide a reset button to your emotions. She provides the example of a couple fighting over inequitable splitting of household chores. Rather than choosing to focus on your partner's selfishness and sloth, she suggests, you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has been aired, which is the first step toward a solution to the problem, and to your improved mood. This seems like a simple exhortation to look on the bright side, but Fredrickson found that skillful use of these emotional "leverage points" can generate a significantly more positive outcome after negative events" (Chapter 3).
"Gallagher's theory, therefore, predicts that if you spent enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. There is, however, a hidden, but equally important, benefit to cultivating rapt attention in your workday. Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives" (Chapter 3).
"Among many breakthroughs, Csikzentmihalyi's work with ESM [Experience Sampling Method] helped validate a theory he had been developing over the prededing decade: 'The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.' Csikzentmihalyi calls this mental state 'Flow,' a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title. At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed, and still do, that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less, and spend more time in the hammock. But the results from Csikzentmihalyi's ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong. 'Ironically,' he writes, 'jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because, like flow activities, they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed'" (Chapter 3).
"Decades of research stemming from Csikzentmihalyi's original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile" (Chapter 3).
"You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit. It's instead like a muscle that tires" (Chapter 4).
The 4 Disciples of the 4DX Framework:
1 Focus on the wildly important.
2 Act on the lead measures
3 Keep a compelling scorecard
4 Accountability
"If the internet plays a large and important role in your evening entertainment, that's fine. Schedule lots of long internet blocks. The key here isn't to avoid, or even to reduce the amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom. One place where this strategy becomes particularly difficult outside work is when you're force to wait. For example, standing in line at a store. It's crucial in these situations that if you're in an offline block, you simply gird yourself for the temporary boredom, and fight through it, with only the company of your thoughts. To simply wait, and be bored, has become a novel experience in modern life. But from the perspective of concentration training, it's incredibly valuable" (Part II - Rule 2).
"...you might worry that adding such structure to your relaxation will defeat the purpose of relaxing, which many believe requires complete freedom from plans or obligations. Won't a structured evening leave you exhausted, and not refreshed the next day at work? Bennett, to his credit, anticipated this complaint. As he argues, such worries misunderstand what energizes the human spirit. What? You say that full energy given to to those 16 hours will lessen the value of the business 8? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredly increase the value of the business 8. One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity. They do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest, except in sleep. In my experience, this analysis is spot-on. If you give your mind to something meaningful to do throughout all your waking hours, you'll end the day more fulfilled, and begin the next one more relaxed than if you instead allow your mind to bathe for hours in semi-conscious and unstructured web-surfing. To summarize, if you want to eliminate the addictive pull of entertainment sites on your time and attention, give your brain a quality alternative. Not only will this preserve your ability to resist distraction and concentrate, but you might even fulfill Arnold Bennett's ambitious goal of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what it means to live, and not just exist" (Rule 3).
"I worried when I first started setting a sender filter, that it would seem pretentious, as if my time was more valuable than that of my readers, and that it would upset people. But this fear wasn't realized. Most people easily accept the idea that you have a right to control your own incoming communication, as they would like to enjoy this same right" (Rule 4).
" ...the technologies underlying e-mail are transformative, but the current social conventions guiding how we apply this technology are under-developed. The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there's an expectation that every message requires a timely response, is absurdly unproductive" (Rule 4).
"A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance, and it's not a philosophical statement. It is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester" (Conclusion).
"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not yet that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Roseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning. In Part 1, I quoted write Winifred Gallagher, saying, 'I'll live the focused life, because it's the best kind there is.' I agree... and hopefully, now that you've finished this book, you agree too (Conclusion).
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Saturday, November 11, 2017
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Book-- 4 Stars. Audio narration by Cassandra Campbell-- 4 stars.
Memorable Quotes:
(many of them cringeworthy)
Then Marilyn took her boxes from the hiding place in the attic and sat down to write James a note. But how did you write something like this? It seemed wrong to write to him on her stationary, as if her were a stranger. More wrong still to write it on the scratch pad in the kitchen, as if it were not more important than a grocery list....[then she writes, starting,] "I realized I'm not happy with the kind of life I lead."~*~*~*~*~
The foam chokes its way down the drain. "I know how to think for myself, you know. Unlike some people, I don't just kowtow to the police." In the blur of her fury, Marilyn doesn't think twice about what she's said. To James, though, the word rifles from his wife's mouth and lodges deep in his chest. From those two syllables, kowtow, explode bent-backed coolies and cone hats, pigtailed Chinamen with sandwiched palms, squinty and servile, bowing and belittled. He has long-suspected that everyone sees him this way...but he had not thought that everyone included Marilyn.
~*~*~*~*~
Her mother must have cried over this page, too, "It's not your fault," your father had said. But Lydia knew it was. They'd done something wrong, she and Nath. They'd made her angry somehow. They hadn't been what she wanted. If her mother ever came home, and told her to finish her milk, she thought, the page wavering to a blur, she would finish her milk. She would brush her teeth without being asked... (about 2/5 of the way thru chapter 6)
~*~*~*~*~
Nath and Lydia brushed their teeth sociably at the sink...It was too big to talk about what had happened.
~*~*~*~*~
As I see it, here's the deep and compelling and worth-mulling-over message of this book:
We all have things we fear are true about ourselves, and when those close to us act in a way that seems to confirm they are true, (often without even knowing it,) it can be devastating and motivate some destructive reactions.
We assume so much about our place in others' lives and how they see us. Assumptions are made back and forth about what's motivating our actions. It would be better for our relationships and our souls to talk about that stuff, but it seems too hard.
I can see this pattern in my life so acutely. These characters often felt a little flat and less than sympathetic as each was obsessed with their own insecurities and attempts at meaning and acceptance. Often they were infuriating in their blindness, and their lack of care for others... but I'm often just as stupid in my assumptions and vain attempts at acceptance.
It was darker than I usually like in fiction. It ended optimistically but not convincingly so. But I still recommend it!
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Counterfeit Gods by Timothy Keller
"One sign that you have made success an idol is the false sense of security it brings. The poor and the marginalized expect suffering, they know that life on this earth is 'nasty, brutish, and short.' Successful people are much more shocked and overwhelmed by troubles. As a pastor, I've often heard people from the upper eschalons say, 'Life isn't supposed to be this way,' when they face tragedy. I have never heard such language in my years as a pastor among the working class and the poor. The false sense of security comes from deifying our achievement and expecting it to keep us safe from the troubles of life in a way that only God can."--75
"The idol of success cannot be just expelled, it must be replaced. The human heart's desire for a particular valuable object may be conquered, but its need to have some such object is unconquerable... Only when we see that Jesus, our great Suffering Servant, has done for us will we finally understand why God's salvation does not require us to do 'some great thing.' We don't have to do it, because Jesus has."--93
"The increasing political polarization and bitterness we see in U.S. politics today is a sign that we have made political activism into a form of religion. Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolters taught that in the biblical view of things, the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin ad the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes and idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good." --100
"Ideology can be used to refer to any coherent set of ideas about a subject, but it can also have a negative connotation closer to its cousin word, idolatry. An ideology, like an idol, is a limited, partial account of reality that is raised to the level of the final word on things. Ideologues believe that their school or party has the real and complete answer to society's problems. Above all, ideologues hide from their adherents their dependence on God."-- 104
"The reality is much less simplistic. Highly progressive tax structures can produce a kind of injustice where people who have worked hard go unrewarded and are penalized by the high taxes. A society of low taxes and few benefits, however, produces a different kind of injustice, where the children of families who can afford good health care and elite education have vastly better opportunities than those who cannot. In short, ideologues cannot admit that there are always significant negative side-effects to any political program. They cannot grant that their opponents have good ideas too. In any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics iwll fill the vacuum for different people. This is the reason that our political discourse is increasingly ideological and polarized. Many describe the current poisonous public discourse as a lack of bipartisanship, but the roots go much deeper than that. As Neibuhr taught, they go back t the beginning of the world, to our alienation from God, and to our frantic efforts to compensate for our feelings of cosmic nakedness and powerlessness. The only way to deal with all these things is to heal our relationship with God."--107
"Putting Nation in the place of God leads to cultural imperialism, and putting Self in the place of God leads to many of the dysfunctional dynamics we have discussed throughout this book. Why did our culture largely abandon God as its Hope? I believe it was because our religious communities have been and continue to be filled with these false gods. Making an idol out of doctrinal accuracy, ministry success, or moral rectitude leads to constant internal conflict, arrogance and self-righteousness, and ooppression of those whose view differ."--132
"Grace is grace. If it is truly trace, then no one was worthy of it at all, and that made all equal." --138
"Archbishop William Temple once said, 'Your religion is what you do with your solitude.'"--168
"The gospel asks, What is operating in the place of Jesus Christ as your real, functional salvation and Savior?"--174
"The idol of success cannot be just expelled, it must be replaced. The human heart's desire for a particular valuable object may be conquered, but its need to have some such object is unconquerable... Only when we see that Jesus, our great Suffering Servant, has done for us will we finally understand why God's salvation does not require us to do 'some great thing.' We don't have to do it, because Jesus has."--93
"The increasing political polarization and bitterness we see in U.S. politics today is a sign that we have made political activism into a form of religion. Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolters taught that in the biblical view of things, the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin ad the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes and idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good." --100
"Ideology can be used to refer to any coherent set of ideas about a subject, but it can also have a negative connotation closer to its cousin word, idolatry. An ideology, like an idol, is a limited, partial account of reality that is raised to the level of the final word on things. Ideologues believe that their school or party has the real and complete answer to society's problems. Above all, ideologues hide from their adherents their dependence on God."-- 104
"The reality is much less simplistic. Highly progressive tax structures can produce a kind of injustice where people who have worked hard go unrewarded and are penalized by the high taxes. A society of low taxes and few benefits, however, produces a different kind of injustice, where the children of families who can afford good health care and elite education have vastly better opportunities than those who cannot. In short, ideologues cannot admit that there are always significant negative side-effects to any political program. They cannot grant that their opponents have good ideas too. In any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics iwll fill the vacuum for different people. This is the reason that our political discourse is increasingly ideological and polarized. Many describe the current poisonous public discourse as a lack of bipartisanship, but the roots go much deeper than that. As Neibuhr taught, they go back t the beginning of the world, to our alienation from God, and to our frantic efforts to compensate for our feelings of cosmic nakedness and powerlessness. The only way to deal with all these things is to heal our relationship with God."--107
"Putting Nation in the place of God leads to cultural imperialism, and putting Self in the place of God leads to many of the dysfunctional dynamics we have discussed throughout this book. Why did our culture largely abandon God as its Hope? I believe it was because our religious communities have been and continue to be filled with these false gods. Making an idol out of doctrinal accuracy, ministry success, or moral rectitude leads to constant internal conflict, arrogance and self-righteousness, and ooppression of those whose view differ."--132
"Grace is grace. If it is truly trace, then no one was worthy of it at all, and that made all equal." --138
"Archbishop William Temple once said, 'Your religion is what you do with your solitude.'"--168
"The gospel asks, What is operating in the place of Jesus Christ as your real, functional salvation and Savior?"--174
Monday, May 22, 2017
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
"If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren't they taught to read the Bible for themselves?' -41
She proceeds to teach the slave children in her Sunday School class the alphabet song.
The Reverend comes... "'We do not sing in Colored Sunday School, and we most assuredly do not sing the alphabet. Are you aware that it is against the law to teach a slave to read?'"
"I knew of this law, thought vaguely, as if it had been stored in a root cellar in my head and suddenly dug up like some moldy yam. All right, it was the law, but it struck me as shameful. Surely he wouldn't claim this was God's will, too.
"He waited for me to answer, and when I didn't, he said, 'Would you put the church in contradiction of the law?'" -43
Words of Sarah's mother, Mrs. Grimke..."'Every girl comes into the world with varying degrees of ambition, even it if's only the hope of not belonging body and soul to her husband. I was a girl once, believe it or not. THe truth is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of ter for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse. Sarah darling, you've faught harder than I imagined, but you must give yourself over to your duty and your fate and make whatever happiness you can.'" -81
Sarah's thought afterward, realizing Handful had overheard: "There's no pain on earth that doesn't crave a benevolent witness." -81
She proceeds to teach the slave children in her Sunday School class the alphabet song.
The Reverend comes... "'We do not sing in Colored Sunday School, and we most assuredly do not sing the alphabet. Are you aware that it is against the law to teach a slave to read?'"
"I knew of this law, thought vaguely, as if it had been stored in a root cellar in my head and suddenly dug up like some moldy yam. All right, it was the law, but it struck me as shameful. Surely he wouldn't claim this was God's will, too.
"He waited for me to answer, and when I didn't, he said, 'Would you put the church in contradiction of the law?'" -43
Words of Sarah's mother, Mrs. Grimke..."'Every girl comes into the world with varying degrees of ambition, even it if's only the hope of not belonging body and soul to her husband. I was a girl once, believe it or not. THe truth is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of ter for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse. Sarah darling, you've faught harder than I imagined, but you must give yourself over to your duty and your fate and make whatever happiness you can.'" -81
Sarah's thought afterward, realizing Handful had overheard: "There's no pain on earth that doesn't crave a benevolent witness." -81
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
A Praying Life by Paul Miller
I found this very helpful!! Didn't love every single chapter, but found lots of help and encouragement and insight from several parts. #1 realization-I need to approach praying from a place of helplessness.
Many quotes I love:
--"...quiet cynicism or spiritual weariness that develops in us when heartfelt prayer goes unanswered. We keep our doubts hidden even from ourselves because we don't want to sound like bad Christians. No reason to add shame to our cynicism. So our hearts shut down" (14), which leads to...."Praying exposes how self-preoccupied we are and uncovers our doubts. It was easier on our faith NOT to pray. After only a few minutes, our prayer is in shambles. Barely out of the starting gate, we collapse on the sidelines--cynical, guilty, and hopeless" (15). Having a strong prayer life requires MORE FAITH. I want that faith.
--"We are so busy that when we slow down to pray, we find it uncomfortable. We prize accomplishments, production. But prayer is nothing but talking to God. It feels useless, as if we are wasting time. Ever bone in our bodies screams, "Get to work." When we aren't working, we are used to being entertained... When we slow down, we slip into a stupor." I want to recognize this barrier to prayer and overcome it.
--On *knowing* that God is my Father, who is accessible, that I have an intimate relationship... but not praying like it: "Your relationship with your heavenly Father is dysfunctional. You talk as if you have an intimate relationship, but you don't. Theoretically, it is close. Practically, it is distant. You need help" (17). "Many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God....prayer is the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center" (20).
--"Since a praying life is interconnected with every part of our lives, learning to pray is almost identical to maturing over a lifetime....So don't hunt for a feeling in prayer. Deep in our psyches we want an experience with God or an experience in prayer. Once we make that our quest, we lose God. YOU DON'T EXPERIENCE GOD, YOU GET TO NOW HIM" (21).
--the solution to cynicism above: "The Praying Life.. Gives Birth to Hope" "Many Christians give in to a quiet cynicism that leaves us uknowingly paralyzed. WE see the world as monolithic, frozen....[if God controls everything,] what's the point [in praying]? Because it is uncomfortable to feel our unbelief to come face-to-face with our cynicism, we dull our souls with the narcotic of activity....Because my Father controls everything, I can ask, and he will listen and act. Since I am his child, change is possible--and hope is born" (23). OH, TO LIVE IN THE BELIEF OF THOSE LAST 2 STATEMENTS.
--"The praying life...becomes integrated" "The quest for a contemplative life can be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. IF we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart" (23).
--"We have an allergic reaction to dependency, but this is the state of the heart most necessary for a praying life. A needy heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer" (24).
--"We know that to become a Christian we shouldn't try to fix ourselves up, but when it comes ot praying, we completely forget that...we don't just come as we are. We try, like adults, to fix ourselves up. Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism. In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the non-personal, nonreal praying that you've been taught" (32).
--"The kingdom comes when Jesus becomes king of your life. But it has to be YOUR LIFE. You can't create a kingdom that doesn't exist, where you try to be better than you really are. Jesus calls that hypocrisy--putting on a mask to cover the real you" (33).
--"Many Christians pray mechanically for God's kingdom (for missionaries, the church, and so on), but all the while their lives are wrapped up in their own kingdom. You can't add God's kingdom as an overlay of your own" (34).
--"...my inability, my mindepression, was my door to God. IN fact, God wanted me depressed about myself and encouraged about His Son. The gospel uses my weakness as the door to God's grace. That is how grace works" (57).
--"You don't need self-discipline to pray continuously; you just need to be poor in spirit" (65).
--"I discovered myself praying simple two-and three-word prayers, such as TEACH ME or HELP ME, JESUS. The psalms are filled with this type of short bullet prayer... Scripture takes the pressure off because we don't have to know exactly what we need....[for example,] 'Lead me to the rock that is higher than I' (Psalm 61:2)" (65-66).
--"Ironically, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since the Fall, evil feels omnipresent, making cynicism an easy sell. Because cynicism sees what is 'really going on,' it feels real, authentic....'I know that I am not alone in my struggle with cynicism...It just feels like we can't find the joy in things, like we are too aware to trust or hope'....Cynicism creates a numbness toward life...The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaged, loving, and hoping...We've moved..to a..detached age...'But that's a double-edged sword. It protects you from crushing disappointments, but it paralyzes you from doing anything.' To be cynical is to be distant...cynicism actually destroys intimacy...Cynicism begins...with naive optimism, or foolish confidence.....'I make the jump from optimism to darkness so quickly because I am not grounded in a deep, abiding faith that God is in the matter, no matter what the matter is. I am looking for pleasant results, not deeper realities'...In naive optimism, we don't need to pray because everything is under control. In cynicism we can't pray because everything is out of control, little is possible" (79-81). "Instead of naive optimism, Jesus calls us to be wary, yet confident in our heavenly Father. We are to combine a robust trust in the Good Shepherd with a vigilance about the presence of evil in our own hearts and the hearts of others. The feel or a praying life is cautious optimism--caution because of the Fall, optimism because of redemption. Cautious optimism allows Jesus to boldly sent his disciples into an evil world" (84). "Cynicism looks in the wrong direction. It looks for the cracks in Christianity instead of looking for the presence of Jesus. It is an orientation of the heart. The sixth cure for cynicism, then is this: develop an eye for Jesus" (96).
Many quotes I love:
--"...quiet cynicism or spiritual weariness that develops in us when heartfelt prayer goes unanswered. We keep our doubts hidden even from ourselves because we don't want to sound like bad Christians. No reason to add shame to our cynicism. So our hearts shut down" (14), which leads to...."Praying exposes how self-preoccupied we are and uncovers our doubts. It was easier on our faith NOT to pray. After only a few minutes, our prayer is in shambles. Barely out of the starting gate, we collapse on the sidelines--cynical, guilty, and hopeless" (15). Having a strong prayer life requires MORE FAITH. I want that faith.
--"We are so busy that when we slow down to pray, we find it uncomfortable. We prize accomplishments, production. But prayer is nothing but talking to God. It feels useless, as if we are wasting time. Ever bone in our bodies screams, "Get to work." When we aren't working, we are used to being entertained... When we slow down, we slip into a stupor." I want to recognize this barrier to prayer and overcome it.
--On *knowing* that God is my Father, who is accessible, that I have an intimate relationship... but not praying like it: "Your relationship with your heavenly Father is dysfunctional. You talk as if you have an intimate relationship, but you don't. Theoretically, it is close. Practically, it is distant. You need help" (17). "Many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God....prayer is the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center" (20).
--"Since a praying life is interconnected with every part of our lives, learning to pray is almost identical to maturing over a lifetime....So don't hunt for a feeling in prayer. Deep in our psyches we want an experience with God or an experience in prayer. Once we make that our quest, we lose God. YOU DON'T EXPERIENCE GOD, YOU GET TO NOW HIM" (21).
--the solution to cynicism above: "The Praying Life.. Gives Birth to Hope" "Many Christians give in to a quiet cynicism that leaves us uknowingly paralyzed. WE see the world as monolithic, frozen....[if God controls everything,] what's the point [in praying]? Because it is uncomfortable to feel our unbelief to come face-to-face with our cynicism, we dull our souls with the narcotic of activity....Because my Father controls everything, I can ask, and he will listen and act. Since I am his child, change is possible--and hope is born" (23). OH, TO LIVE IN THE BELIEF OF THOSE LAST 2 STATEMENTS.
--"The praying life...becomes integrated" "The quest for a contemplative life can be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. IF we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart" (23).
--"We have an allergic reaction to dependency, but this is the state of the heart most necessary for a praying life. A needy heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer" (24).
--"We know that to become a Christian we shouldn't try to fix ourselves up, but when it comes ot praying, we completely forget that...we don't just come as we are. We try, like adults, to fix ourselves up. Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism. In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the non-personal, nonreal praying that you've been taught" (32).
--"The kingdom comes when Jesus becomes king of your life. But it has to be YOUR LIFE. You can't create a kingdom that doesn't exist, where you try to be better than you really are. Jesus calls that hypocrisy--putting on a mask to cover the real you" (33).
--"Many Christians pray mechanically for God's kingdom (for missionaries, the church, and so on), but all the while their lives are wrapped up in their own kingdom. You can't add God's kingdom as an overlay of your own" (34).
--"...my inability, my mindepression, was my door to God. IN fact, God wanted me depressed about myself and encouraged about His Son. The gospel uses my weakness as the door to God's grace. That is how grace works" (57).
--"You don't need self-discipline to pray continuously; you just need to be poor in spirit" (65).
--"I discovered myself praying simple two-and three-word prayers, such as TEACH ME or HELP ME, JESUS. The psalms are filled with this type of short bullet prayer... Scripture takes the pressure off because we don't have to know exactly what we need....[for example,] 'Lead me to the rock that is higher than I' (Psalm 61:2)" (65-66).
--"Ironically, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since the Fall, evil feels omnipresent, making cynicism an easy sell. Because cynicism sees what is 'really going on,' it feels real, authentic....'I know that I am not alone in my struggle with cynicism...It just feels like we can't find the joy in things, like we are too aware to trust or hope'....Cynicism creates a numbness toward life...The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaged, loving, and hoping...We've moved..to a..detached age...'But that's a double-edged sword. It protects you from crushing disappointments, but it paralyzes you from doing anything.' To be cynical is to be distant...cynicism actually destroys intimacy...Cynicism begins...with naive optimism, or foolish confidence.....'I make the jump from optimism to darkness so quickly because I am not grounded in a deep, abiding faith that God is in the matter, no matter what the matter is. I am looking for pleasant results, not deeper realities'...In naive optimism, we don't need to pray because everything is under control. In cynicism we can't pray because everything is out of control, little is possible" (79-81). "Instead of naive optimism, Jesus calls us to be wary, yet confident in our heavenly Father. We are to combine a robust trust in the Good Shepherd with a vigilance about the presence of evil in our own hearts and the hearts of others. The feel or a praying life is cautious optimism--caution because of the Fall, optimism because of redemption. Cautious optimism allows Jesus to boldly sent his disciples into an evil world" (84). "Cynicism looks in the wrong direction. It looks for the cracks in Christianity instead of looking for the presence of Jesus. It is an orientation of the heart. The sixth cure for cynicism, then is this: develop an eye for Jesus" (96).
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