Tag: Life

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace 

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace 

— Frederick Buechner 

‘As Philip Yancey wrote, Buechner “tries to reawaken the child in people: the one who naïvely trusts, who will at least go and look for the magic place, who is not ashamed of not knowing the answers because he is not expected to know the answers.”’

”One of Buechner’s often cited observations is that you find your vocation at the spot where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. ”

”Buechner’s vocation was to show a way to experience the fullness of life. Of death, he wrote, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

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Once we acknowledge that limited time is remaining, although we don’t know if that is years, weeks, or hours, we are less driven by ego or by what other people think. Instead, we are more driven by what our hearts truly want. Acknowledging our inevitable, approaching death offers us the opportunity to find greater purpose and satisfaction in the time we have remaining

Once we acknowledge that limited time is remaining, although we don’t know if that is years, weeks, or hours, we are less driven by ego or by what other people think. Instead, we are more driven by what our hearts truly want. Acknowledging our inevitable, approaching death offers us the opportunity to find greater purpose and satisfaction in the time we have remaining

— Bronnie Ware from ”Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.”

Top five regrets of the dying

  • “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
  • “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
  • “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
  • “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
  • “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

On December 15, 1933, Jung responded to a woman who had asked his guidance on, quite simply, how to live. Two generations after the young Nietzsche admonished that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Jung writes:

On December 15, 1933, Jung responded to a woman who had asked his guidance on, quite simply, how to live. Two generations after the young Nietzsche admonished that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Jung writes:

(Link)

Dear Frau V.,

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. With kind regards and wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung