Focus on Your Own Heart

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 2 minutes, or less.

A SHORT STORY

I had a tough time last week. As much as I tried, I simply couldn’t get that voice in my head to calm down when I considered all the pressure I’m feeling in my life right now.

Often, in these moments, I turn to spiritual thinkers to find some way through. While doing so, I came across a story about Thomas Merton, the great Catholic monk, that offered me some calm.

A burned-out activist once wrote to Merton, “Everyone is acting so badly, and I don’t know if all the effort I’m putting in to stop it will be worth anything.”

And Merton said to him, “You have to focus not on what they’re doing.

The work you do may succeed. It may not. It may even make things worse.

You have to focus on your own heart, on the value, the rightness, the truth, the best of the work you do for yourself, and leave it to unfold as it will. What you get to do is guide your heart through this world and offer blessings, when you can.”

I hope that helps you this week, in all the ways it is helping me.

Where in your life right now do you need to stop focusing on what others are doing and guide your own heart instead?

A POEM

“Lead” by Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Grateful,

Michael