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Day 6 | |
"These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they | |
grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world." | |
Self-reliance often means following our quiet, inner voice | |
more faithfully. It means not just listening to what we | |
say, or even to what we think, but paying more attention to | |
what usually lies beneath our consciousness. Picasso himself | |
knew that what he wanted to express wasn't his own idea: | |
"To know what you're going to draw, you have to | |
begin drawing. . . . When I find myself facing a blank page, | |
that's always going through my head. What I capture in spite | |
of myself interests me more than my own ideas." | |
Picasso wasn't aiming to express his ideas | |
but ideas that seemed to be beyond him. He understood that | |
self-reliance wasn't about absolute control and knowing the | |
answer ahead of time, but diving into the unknown and | |
trusting himself to navigate. | |
Write about a time you listened to that inner voice, then a | |
time you ignored it. How did each turn out? How did the | |
conversations with your inner voice differ? How can you | |
become better attuned to those subtle nudgings? | |
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The inner voice. How quiet it can be and how deaf I can be to | |
hearing it. I know all too well when this voice speaks to me and | |
I know all to well when my thoughts are too loud to hear. I have | |
come to trust this voice, but I don't always heed its suggestions. | |
An example of a time when I did listen to this voice was when | |
I was going out to lunch with some of my colleagues. There | |
was this angry lady preaching about God and harassing | |
pedestrians about how they don't believe in God and they were | |
going to go to hell. She was being loud and making people | |
upset. For some reason, I was drawn to talk to her. | |
I went up to her and said in a soft, calm voice, "Hi, how are you | |
doing?" She looked at me with suspicion and said, "these people, | |
they are going to hell! They don't know God!" My response to her, | |
which came out of nowhere, was, "God loves you and thats all | |
that matters." She looked me in the eye and initially I saw | |
bewilderment and then that turned into something like realization | |
or something. She turned and quietly started walking down the | |
street. | |
I went back to my colleagues and they were like, "what was that | |
about?" I just told them, "I think she was lost." And that | |
was that. | |
It was just so bizarre and I don't normally do things like | |
that. I don't even like talking to strangers, especially on | |
the street. It just felt like that was something I was supposed to | |
do at that moment. My mind didn't even really feel like it was in | |
the fore-front, rather, it took a back seat while my ghost was | |
hacked and being operated remotely. I was a passenger and | |
could only experience the happenings. | |
That was an example of when I listened. An example of when I | |
don't is for another time. It has been over 20 minutes and I | |
gotta go. | |
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