Love, Work, and Doing Nothing

by | Oct 25, 2017

My mind has been blank lately and so I go in search of inspiration. Digging through files, papers, and notes until I find a few gems that draw my attention and I feel are right for sharing, here and now.

This first one is from a writer I am often drawn to, Rainer Maria Rilke.

Like so many other things,  people have also misunderstood the position love has in life; they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure are more blissful than work, but there is nothing happier than work, and love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work. – So those who love must try to act as if they had a great work to accomplish. They must be much alone and go into themselves and gather and concentrate themselves; they must become something. For the more we are, the richer everything we experience is. And those who want to have a deep love in their lives must collect and save for it, and gather honey.       (~translated by Stephen Mitchell)

The second is by Thomas Merton.

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual….There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.

until next time…