Stopping talking about things is the first stage in stopping thinking about things.*
(Dave Trott)

The more we come to the painful confession of our loneliness, hostility and illusion, the more we are able to see solitude and hospitality and prayer as part of the vision of our life.**
(Henri Nouwen)

I love to find the places my random morning reading overlaps; when I sit down with my journal, I have no idea what awaits me.

Here are some of the things that came out of today’s.

Dave Trott shares about the matter-of-fact way his mother and her generation talked about death, different members of the extended family deciding to buy adjoining graves.

A nice quiet spot in the graveyard, near some trees, with toilets close by for visitors:

Even after death, she’s worried about visitors needing the loo.*

This got me thinking about the five elemental truths I carry with me at all times.

I’ve mentioned them before, but here they are again:

Life is hard;
You’re not as special as you think;
Your life is not about you;
You’re not in control;
You’re going to die.^

These look to have finality about them at first glance, life narrowing down around us as we walk through them.

The original intention, though, was for young people to be able to pass through these into a full and contributing life as members of their societies.

They’re not dead-ends, but thresholds into a larger world, an infinite game.^^

What may on the other side of each of these?

Life is hard, but we have each other to help one another through?

You’re not as special as you think, but there is something that you are able to do that brings magic into the world?

What do you see ahead as you walk through these?

The reality is, we can shape our lives as we want them to be.

John O’Donohue highlights our problem:

We have separated soul from experience, become totally taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior life to shrink.*^

This isn’t a finite place we find ourselves.

We can look through our dilemma into a growing interior world, a rejoining of soul and experience.

In his latest book, Ben Hardy shares how he faced the difficult things about himself, determining to explore a newly found belief that he could do anything with this life.

Through reading more than 100 books, journaling and in conversation with people he trusted, he turned his life around.

He choose the infinite game.

We all can.

We don’t have to be religious to make sense of Henri Nouwen’s three movements.

Here’s how we might translate them:

To know and be home in our True Self;
Include others in our lives who can help us grow;
Live for something bigger than ourselves.

Each moves through the finite into the infinite.

*From Dave Trott’s One + One = Three;
**From Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out;
^From Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return;
^^I’m reading Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game;
*^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.