Favourite quote of the day:
"If you don't eat meat, you're gonna die!" - Dad
Going to bed and reading a bit of that guy we all know and love, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and his book Erroneous Zones, kindly lent to me by Sean. The cover features an extreme close up photo of him in all his 70's glory and shagginess. I'm just having a hard time concentrating as I've got a few areas of body pain and it's pissing me off so I'll just give it a break and go get horizontal.
Let me leave you with the opening few words:
"The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness".
Look over your shoulder. You will notice a constant companion. For want of a better name, call him Your-Own-Death. You can fear this visitor or use him for your personal gain. the choice is up to you.
With death so endless a proposition and life so breathtakingly brief, ask yourself, "Should I avoid doing the things I really want to do?" "Should I live my life as others want me to?" "Are things important to accumulate?" "Is putting it off the way to live?" Chances are your answers can be summed up in a few words: Live... Be You.... Enjoy..... Love.
You can fear your death, ineffectually, or you can use it to help you learn to live effectively. Listen to Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych as he awaits the great leveler, contemplating a past which was thoroughly dominated by others, a life in which he had given up control of himself in order to fit into a system.
"What if my whole life has been wrong?" It occurred to him that what had appeare
d perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely noticeable impulses, which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing and the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.....The next time you are contemplating a decision in which you are debating whether or not to take charge of yourself, to make your own choice, ask yourself an important question, "How long am I going to be dead?" With that eternal perspective, you can now make your own choice and leave the worrying, the fears, the question of whether you can afford it and the guilt to those who are going to be alive forever.
If you don't begin taking these steps, you can anticipate living your entire life the way others say you must. Surely if your sojourn on earth is so brief, it ought at least to be pleasing to you. In a word, it's your life; do with it what you want.
- excerpt from Erroneous Zones, Wayne Dyer, 1976
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