Friday, October 12, 2007

Gratitude for This Dissatisfied Heart

It has been a long while, but I found the following in my inbox, from Paulo Coehlo's Warrior of Light newsletter and felt compelled to post it:

Lord, give us always a dissatisfied heart.
Give us a heart where the questions that we never want to ask can be voiced.
Deliver us from our conformism.
Make us able to enjoy what we have, but let us understand that this is not everything.
Let us appreciate that we are good people.
But above all, make us always ask ourselves how we can become better people.
Because if we ask, then it is quite possible that You will come and show us horizons that we couldn’t see before.
I feel like this sums up the journey I've been on since the beginning of the year. The past few months I have definitely been shown horizons that I could not have imagined before. I'm at such a different place now because I opened myself up to the difficult questions that did not want to be voiced. More importantly, I'm learning to tune in to the unadulterated response from God/the universe/the infinite and am letting go of the need to control the answers.

Further down in the newsletter, he tells the following story:

Strolling along the promenade, I hear a young woman saying to another in a very convincing voice: “I’ve programmed my life in the following way...”

That made me wonder: does she take into account things that happen just when we are not expecting them? Has she considered that maybe God has a different plan, a far more interesting one? Has she thought seriously about the hypothesis that, by including other people in her program, she might be interfering in different ideas and projects?


He could very well have been describing me. That how I was, not a control freak by any means, but I certainly felt the need to "be the master of my own destiny." But I'm learning that, not having all the answers, perhaps I'm not the most qualified to be that master. I've just been driving myself nuts with all the planning over people and circumstances that are beyond my control.

Luckily I believe in a benevolent, loving God/universe/infinite to whom I'm willing to hand over the helm. Thinking back, whenever I've unwittingly done this in the past, the greatest blessings have entered with the least amount of effort: meeting my best friend way back in first grade, meeting and falling in love with my husband, stumbling into my current career, finding my life coach, etc.

I feel very blessed.