Tag: C.S. Lewis

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

— C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity (Tingle Books, May 17 2024) (via The Hammock Papers)

Notes:

  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Walking. Pulled forward by Good.

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It’s 2 a.m., and Wally’s licking my arm: “Sorry Dad,” he says, “Gotta go.” “Jesus, Wally, now?” And that was the end of that. 

I turn to the morning papers, blog posts and RSS feeds. Kaveh Akbar’s words echo: “Time flattens everything. Family, duty, whatever…There’s something comforting about that, something vast and, yes, inescapable. Like bright ink spilling over everything at once.”

I pull into the parking lot. Sigh, another day, another walk.

1502 consecutive (almost) days on my Cove Island Park morning walk. Like in a row.

I walk. 

Eyes burn, fatigue has set in.

65° F, 10 mph winds from the north — I immediately regret not bringing a windbreaker. Left it resting on the front seat of the car. 

I’m dragging my a** around the track, directly into the headwinds. Shiver. I could turn back, walk ¼ mile to the car, and grab the jacket. But that simple turn, a few hundred steps back, just seemed to be too much. 

Continue reading “Walking. Pulled forward by Good.” →

Loved it…

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I will only remind you of your earlier observations… And what people say is less important than what they cannot.

— C. S. Lewis, in a conversation with Sigmund Freud, in “Freud’s Last Sessions” (2023).

Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”  We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

—  C.S. Lewis, from The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, May 28, 2009)

Quote: Thank you The Hammock Papers

Saturday Afternoon

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What can be better than to get a book out on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away until next week.

—  C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1. Family Letters, 1905-1931

Quote Source: delta-breezes