Daily Meditation-January 21, 2022-The Idea of Inspiration

Today’s Quotation:

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world.  Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.

Patanjali

Today’s Meditation:

Many people spend much of their lives waiting for inspiration, hoping that it will hit them and cause them to create something magnificent or marvelous that will bring them fame, fortune, and/or great satisfaction.  What they don’t realize, though, is that people find inspiration through hard work, exploration, experimentation and effort.  Inspiration doesn’t just come to us out of the clear blue sky; we invite it into our lives by taking on tasks and jobs that we may not be sure are right for us, then doing our best at them and finding a new source of spark in our lives.

We aren’t usually inspired to find a great purpose; rather, we need to identify a great purpose that feels right to us and get to working on it.  Inspiration comes later, as we work.  Inspiration comes from inside of us, not from outside, and we have to do something to pull it out.  That often involves taking risks in many different areas of our lives.  How many people won’t leave a job to find one that inspires them more because they’re comfortable in their current job, or because the bills need to be paid and it’s too big of a risk to lose the income for a certain period of time?  In such cases, we may spend most of our lives waiting futilely for inspiration to come around.

We don’t have to leave our jobs to be inspired, of course.  But we do have to reach out in new directions and try different things if we’re to trigger new thoughts and ideas and responses in our minds.  We can find inspiration in hobbies, arts, volunteer work, visiting new place, reading, taking classes, or many other different places.  But the key is that we have to uncover it.  A buried treasure won’t just appear before us–it has to be dug up, unless there’s a huge flood or an earthquake to uncover it.  But the floods and earthquakes are very rare and unpredictable–and we all have access to shovels.

Questions to ponder:

1. What have you learned that inspiration is?  How have you learned to become inspired?

2. Where do you think the idea of inspiration coming from somewhere else originated?

3. List a few enjoyable things that you could do that might provide you with inspiration.

For further thought:

Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time.  True inspiration always steals on a person, its importance not being fully recognized for some time.

Samuel Butler

Credit: Living Life Fully