Listen to the Gentle Voice Within -Daily Meditation 9.14.22
Today’s quotation:
If we learn once again to listen to the gentle voice within, we will hear it counseling us many times a day to simplify our lives. When the voices of the world propose the multiple complexities of modern living, the gentle voices within will whisper: Why complicate your life?-Matthew Kelly
Today’s Meditation:
The world around us doesn’t necessarily want us to discover the joy and peace that we can find in simplicity. After all, once we simplify our lives, we’ll need fewer things, we’ll buy fewer things, and people who are selling things will make less money from our consumerism. So why would they want us to simplify, even if doing so can make us much happier and healthier?
We can simplify in many ways: smaller living spaces, fewer possessions, fewer commitments, less time working and hurrying about, fewer credit cards, less expensive cars, and homes and clothing–you name it, and there’s usually a way (or two) that we can simplify almost any aspect of our lives. And every step we take to simplify, we lose one more thing to worry about. Cut up a credit card and pay off the bill and there’s one less payment every month. Get rid of the second and third TVs in the house, and there’s less to clean, less chance of them breaking down and needing replacement, and smaller electric bills each month.
Nobody can tell us just what areas in our own lives are ripe for simplifying unless we give them a lot of insight into our lives and ourselves and ask for advice. Most simplifying will come from inside, and if we listen to that gentle voice that Matthew tells us about, we can find many areas in which we can make our lives simpler, more peaceful, and more satisfying.
Why complicate your life? Perhaps the better question is, why have we complicated our lives so much already? And how can we scale back to get rid of so many of the complications that we’ve brought on ourselves?
Questions to consider:
In which areas of your life can you simplify easily?
What effects would simplifying have on your life?
What’s an easy first step toward simplifying?
For further thought:
Do you know the more I look into the life, the more things it seems to me I can successfully lack–and continue to grow happier. How many kinds of food I do not need, or cooks to cook them, how much curious clothing or tailors to make it, how many books I have never read, and pictures that are not worthwhile! The farther I run, the more I feel like casting aside all such impediments–lest I fail to arrive at the far goal of my endeavor.-David Grayson
