Note to God

Lord, help me to fight escapism as a means to shirk my responsibilities at work.

The solution to your quest for more: defining and embracing the beauty of your enough.   Lagom is a Swedish term that translates to “just the right amount.” Lagom is what we are searching for—the knowledge of enough, of balance, of equilibrium. The challenge is that lagom isn’t static; it tends to be an ever-increasing target. As you get closer to achieving it, your confidence swells and resets to a higher level. This subconscious reset—from “I’ll be happy when I have [$X]” to “I’ll be happy when I have triple [$X]”—creates the upward spiral of expectations that you need to avoid.  You will never have true Financial Wealth if you allow your expectations—your definition of enough—to grow faster than your assets. There is no perfect antidote. Hedonic adaptation means our chase for more is genetically hardwired, but forcing the definition of enough out of the subconscious mind and into the conscious mind is a start. “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us,” s...

Seeing is an important aspect of spiritual life. The way we see money, things, woman, man.  If you can't see goodness, you cannot say you love someone.  To see people beyond our passions. To see goodness in them and to love them.  Only with love can we see things clearly. Not just with human love, but the love of God for him or her.  To delight in the image of God in others.

Self control needs to be maturity in order to overcome tendencies. Tendencies isn't a sin, it's neutral, but we need self-control.

Of things wrongly done, and things I have failed to do. - time wasted - distraction - missing occasion to help pll

A coach once shared sth obvious, but it makes so much sense: If you want a winning team, you first got to stop losing games. Even in spiritual life, we first got to omit all these inadequacies in charity in order to love better.

They ignored what you call your "rights," which I translated for you as your "right to be proud." 

Here are ten pieces of relationship advice that everyone needs to hear:  1. Never keep score in love. Scoreboards are for sports games, not marriages.  2. Maintain interests and passions separate from your partner’s. Marriage should not be the end of individuality. 3. It can’t always be fifty-fifty. Sometimes it will be ninety-ten; sometimes it will be ten-ninety. All that matters is that it adds up to one hundred. 4. One man said, “Never stop dating. I’m ninety-nine and still courting my wife!” Marriages don’t get boring; you stop trying. 5. No one has ever argued their way to a happy marriage. When facing a challenge, face it together.  6. You cannot take care of your partner if you aren’t taking care of yourself. Make a list of your daily needs to feel good and have your partner do the same. Make sure you and your partner are able to do the things on that list.  7. Never involve nonprofessional third parties (parents, friends, siblings, coworkers) in disagreements...

John henry newman The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backward, that describes the process of learning and spiritual growth as a journey where one often makes mistakes and experiences setbacks before finding truth. It signifies that progress towards spiritual understanding is not always a direct, linear path, but rather involves a process of trial and error, learning from mistakes and false starts.  We advance to the truth by experience of error; we succeed through failures. We know not how to do right except by having done wrong. We call virtue a mean,—that is, as considering it to lie between things that are wrong. We know what is right, not positively, but negatively;—we do not see the truth at once and make towards it, but we fall upon and try error, and find it is not the truth. We grope about by touch, not by sight, and so by a miserable experience exhaust the possible modes of acting till naught is left, but truth, remaining. Such is the process by which we succeed; we...

May integrity and uprightness protect me,     because my hope, Lord,[c] is in you.

1 Keep me safe, my God,     for in you I take refuge. 2 I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;     apart from you I have no good thing.” [...] 5 Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;     you make my lot secure. [...] 7 I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;     even at night my heart instructs me. 8 I keep my eyes always on the Lord.     With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken. 9 Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;     my body also will rest secure, 10 because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,     nor will you let your faithful[b] one see decay. 11 You make known to me the path of life;     you will fill me with joy in your presence,     with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

While his piece was intended as a humorous critique of bureaucratic inefficiency, the principle is applicable to a range of situations, from personal time management to large-scale projects. The generalized insight rings true: Have all day to process email and you end up emailing for the entire day. Have thirty minutes to process email and you crank through your entire inbox in a flash. Have months to complete an assignment and you procrastinate enough for the assignment to take months. Have two days to complete an assignment and you work efficiently and get it done. Open time frames lead to a lot of movement and very little progress—the rocking-horse phenomenon of busywork culture. We tend to be more efficient and productive when constraints come into play. We also tend to focus on the important when pressed for time. You can leverage Parkinson’s law to be more efficient and effective in your professional and personal life:  -  Establish time blocks that are shorter than yo...

The three pillars of Time Wealth—awareness, attention, and control—are individually important, but are best thought of as a progression: awareness first, attention next, control last. Each pillar builds on and is a by-product of the foundation established by the others. From awareness (developing an understanding of the fleeting time remaining) to attention (narrowing the aperture to focus on the things that truly matter) to control (allocating time according to goals and values), Dave Prout cultivated his Time Wealth—and you can too. As you measure Time Wealth, the three pillars provide a blueprint for the right action to build it. By developing an understanding of these pillars and the high-leverage systems that affect them, you can begin to create the right outcomes.

When using rest and recreation inappropriately, dissipation can happen. You slave in your senses and facilities in whatever pool you meet on your way. The result is scattered attention, deaden will and quickened concupiscence.  Subject yourself once again to a serious plan of life. 

Like king Pyrrhus, he won the battles but at all cost. Ultimately he lost the war.  If all the battles you’re fighting are exclusively about money, you may win these battles, but you will lose the war. The warning signs on the path don’t involve loss of life and limb like they did for King Pyrrhus, but they aren’t pretty:   - You hit another quarterly profit target but miss another anniversary dinner. - You earn a record bonus but fail to make it to a single one of your child’s sports games.  -You say yes to every single work call but can’t find time to reconnect with an old friend.  - You stay in a job for the security but allow your higher-order purpose to wither and die.  - You host five client dinners per week but can’t walk up the stairs without feeling winded.  -You never leave money on the table but won’t think twice about leaving your peace of mind there.   If you march ahead, eyes fixed on the financial horizon, the Pyrrhic victory a...

Psalm 4

Be daring: tell him that you are crazier about him than Mary Magdalen, than either of his two Teresas, that you love him madly, more than Augustine and Dominic and Francis, more than Ignatius and Xavier.

During prayer time, it is absolutely necessary to resist the urge to board those trains and boats that go by.  Don't identify with these thoughts The just come to us, they are not of us, but on at a display on the backdrop of our interior silence. 

Man need healthy agression - generation and penetrative