A nice article of Martha Beck about facing fear on www.oprah.com:
“When you shoot,” my friend Jim, a hockey player, once told me, “you never want to look at the goalie. Look at the space around him. Where your eyes go, the puck goes.” A white-water kayaker warned me, “Look at the water, not at the rocks. Where your eyes go, the boat goes.” My riding instructor shouted, “Look where you want to go, not where you don’t. Where your eyes go, the horse goes.”
… Let’s just anticipate that we (all of us) will disappoint ourselves somehow in the decade to come. Go ahead and let it happen. Let somebody else be a better mother than you for one afternoon. Let somebody else go to art school. Let somebody else have a happy marriage, while you foolishly pick the wrong guy. (Hell, I’ve done it; it’s survivable.) While you’re at it, take the wrong job. Move to the wrong city. Lose your temper in front of the boss, quit training for that marathon, wolf down a truckload of cupcakes the day after you start your diet. Blow it all catastrophically, in fact, and then start over with good cheer. This is what we all must learn to do, for this is how maps get charted—by taking wrong turns that lead to surprising passageways that open into spectacularly unexpected new worlds. So just march on. Future generations will thank you—trust me—for showing the way, for beating brave new footpaths out of wonky old mistakes.
Fall flat on your face if you must, but please, for the sake of us all, do not stop. Map your own life.
For the preceding part of this wonderful article by Elizabeth Gilbert, go HERE
Interesting article on Oprah.com by Martha Beck:
There was a time when I thought such small-scale enjoyment, in a world so filled with suffering, was a crime in itself. It was hard to take a bite of my overabundant food, hug my healthy children, or drive one fossil-fueled mile without pangs of guilt. The only moral thing to do, I believed, was to sustain an attentive misery, honoring the pain and danger in this world. But over the years, as I’ve seen what leads to positive change and what doesn’t, I’ve become a sort of joy hound. I now agree with the poet Jack Gilbert: “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.” This isn’t narcissistic pleasure-seeking. It’s the way to make your own life work and give your best to the world.
An interesting article on Oprah.com about listening to your ‘vocation’. It’s written by Parker J. Palmer: author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change.
‘I’ve come to understand vocation not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received—the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation doesn’t come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I’m not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be.’
The full article you can read HERE