Irony
A couple of weeks ago, I started a series of guided prayer exercises. Each day I have a short scripture reading that's then followed by one or two questions as a focus for contemplative prayer. Today's questions were, Who am I? What do I want? Who do I want to be?" You'd think this would be ideal fodder for an introspect like me.
This structured program of prayer has overlapped with a work recommended time management program that's designed to coordinate pro-active planning with acting with a flexible sense of immediacy. The goal is to simultaneously increase efficiency and minimize stress. It hasn't really worked well for me. I'm pretty time disciplined as is though I, like most people, sometimes need to refocus on the right priorities.
Getting hit with those big questions at the start of my day today made the time management plan fall into place. It seems that wanting to avoid the Really Big Issues is a great motivator to fill your time with other activities. However it does mean that I've got some late night off-line journaling to do. Darn it.
prayer
time management
This structured program of prayer has overlapped with a work recommended time management program that's designed to coordinate pro-active planning with acting with a flexible sense of immediacy. The goal is to simultaneously increase efficiency and minimize stress. It hasn't really worked well for me. I'm pretty time disciplined as is though I, like most people, sometimes need to refocus on the right priorities.
Getting hit with those big questions at the start of my day today made the time management plan fall into place. It seems that wanting to avoid the Really Big Issues is a great motivator to fill your time with other activities. However it does mean that I've got some late night off-line journaling to do. Darn it.
prayer
time management
posted by Cynthia at
11:19 PM
2 Comments:
Cynthia, I was just tonight reading a book about art, specifically writing poetry, as a form of meditation. It's subject is the poet Theodore Roethke, and the author draws from his personal, unpublished notebooks in which he referenced specific readings in the subject, specifically Evelyn Underhill. It's fascinating reading. Roethke believed for the practice of meditation (i.e. writing) to work, one has to focus on something specific. So these big, open-ended questions wouldn't have worked for him. They don't work for me, either. Writing about a specific event, however, does. Think of Jesus and his parables. Specific situations. Through them, you find the inner self. You work it out. Of course, you fall into a pit again, but it's not the same pit, and you keep working up the spiral toward a higher consciousness. I should really do a blog entry on this. Hope you work it out, Cynthia.
Who an I? What do I want? Who do I want to be? More than a day's meditation, these are monumental questions most of us don't answer satisfactorily in a lifetime. I'm puzzled about what this program really can accomplish.
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