The Sacrament of the Present Moment

Different paths led us here.  We each came here on our own journey.  And soon we will follow different paths away from here.  For our journeys are different.  But what matters is that now, in the present, they overlap.  We cover the same ground. We take in the same scenery, pass by the same waypoints, and even share the company of the same fellow travellers.

Sometimes I think the sadness that sometimes falls between us is not so much because the part of the journey we have together is so short, but because each of us can't understand the path the other must take in the end.  I can only really know what it is like to travel the journey I was given, and you yours.  In the end, my path is not to be your path, and your path is not to be my path.  This keeps us apart even now.  For how can I understand you, if your path and mine are not the same?

But come, let us walk together for as long as we can.

Self-Forgetfulness

The following is the text of a paper I delievered on February 11, 2012 at the Edith Stein Conference held on the campus of the University of Notre Dame.  The title of the 2012 conference was "Encountering Vulnerability: Courage, Hope and Trust in the 21st Century."  The title of the paper is "Self-Forgetfulness: The Little Way to Love and the Path to Vulnerability."

Vulnerability is a particularly human problem.  To be human, to have an existence which is both spiritual and material, means that the possibility of suffering is unavoidable.  As long as we are alive, there is a chance that somehow we will be hurt.  There are two possible responses to this fact of the human condition.  The first is what I take to be our instinctive reaction.  We can try to minimize our vulnerability.  It seem like it would be best if we were free from the possibility of pain, brokenness, and anxiety.  And who can blame this inclination? Life, comfort, and security are good things after all.  The other response is to embrace our vulnerability.  Although we might not want to seek out vulnerability for its own sake, perhaps there is some great good whose existence necessarily entails the possibility of suffering.  One reason to think that vulnerability should be embraced rather than avoided is because vulnerability and love are apparently connected. The Christian author C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, writes that:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness.  But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless– it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”[1]

A similar point is made by the author Madeleine L’Engle in her Reflections on Faith and Art.  “When the phone rings at an unexpected hour,” she writes, “my heart lurches.  I love, therefore I am vulnerable.  When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable.  But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.”[2]

My goal today is to explore this connection between love and vulnerability, which is suggested to us by authors like Lewis and L’Engle, and to really take up the question of how it is that we are to love and how this leads in its turn to the possibility of pain and brokenness.  I mean to do so primarily through a look at the spirituality of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.  Her spirituality is sometimes called The Little Way and it can be summarized as doing little things, particularly the mundane, day to day things, with great love.  If to love is in some way the purpose of life, as Thérèse would most certainly have agreed, the spirituality of Thérèse presents an immensely practical challenge and a call for us to embrace our vulnerability.

 Thérèse, you may know, was a Carmelite religious who was born in Alençon, France to her quite devout parents, Louis and Zelie Martin.  At a very young age she felt called to religious life and entered the cloister in Lisieux at the age of just fifteen, taking the name Thérèse of the Child Jesus.  Although she lived a life of relative obscurity, devotion to Thérèse spread quickly after her death at the age of just 24, thanks to the help of her spiritual autobiography, today commonly titled The Story of a Soul.  She was canonized in 1925, a mere 28 years after her death, and was later named a doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul the Second.

Put most simply, Thérèse’s spirituality is one of total self-forgetfulness. She recognized that to truly love God, above anything else, requires a focus that is totally outward directed.  Truly loving others and wanting what is best for them necessitates that we set aside our cares, desires, and well-being for the sake of others.  This self-forgetfulness follows naturally, as it were, from complete love of others.

This Little Way starts with humility.  One of spiritual writings which had the most influence on Thérèse, was Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ.  The Imitation roots its reflections in humility.  “All is vanity,” the author reminds us, “except to love God, and Him only to serve.”[3]  It is vanity to seek our own advancement, our own wishes and our own desires, while neglecting the things of heaven.  True humility is to recognize that nothing really belongs to us, because everything, even our very life, was given to us from without.  We recognize our dependence and our own weakness, and thus our insignificance.  Inspired by The Imitation, Thérèse was nothing if not acutely aware of her own littleness before God.  She considered herself but a ‘little flower’ offered to God.

It is only from this position of humility that one can embrace suffering with open arms.  Even as a child, Thérèse realized that the way of perfect love is the way of suffering.  She writes, “I realised at once that there was no reaching sanctity unless you were prepared to suffer a great deal, to be always on the look-out for something higher still, and to forget yourself.”[4]  Thérèse resolved to “choose the whole lot”[5] of suffering which was offered to her.  “No point in becoming a Saint by halves,”[6] she writes.  “I’m not afraid of suffering for your sake; the only thing I’m afraid of is clinging to my own will.  Take it, I want the whole lot, everything whatsoever that is your will for me.”[7]  Thérèse developed a great love of suffering, rejoicing to put God’s will and the happiness of others before her own.

To be clear, Thérèse’s attitude towards suffering is not one of self-destructive, self-hatred.  Suffering is not an end in its own right.  The key thing is the self-forgetfulness which is manifest by an acceptance of suffering.  It is true that thinking not of oneself often leads to pain which is the denial of the will.  There is also the pain of empathy.  But what matters is the love embodied by the willingness to suffer, not suffering itself.  Although Thérèse had a developed a great love of suffering, she reached a point where she was willing to give up even suffering itself if that was what was asked of her.

There is a certain danger in continually asking “what can I do in this moment to better love and to surrender my own will?”  That’s not a bad question. It’s just that the question is itself self-focused.  But the goal here is complete self-forgetfulness.  Thérèse recognized this peculiar danger, as she prepared to enter Carmel.  After having been initially denied permission to join the Carmelites at an exceptionally young age, Thérèse went on pilgrimage to Rome with her sister, her father, and others from the diocese.  On a biographical note, it was on this trip to Italy that Thérèse famously asked Pope Leo XIII at the audience her group received if she might have permission to enter the Carmel early.  But before this on the pilgrimage, Thérèse describes riding on the train through Switzerland.  She was amazed by the display of natural beauty out the windows of the train, the mountains, the waterfalls, and the valleys.  It was so spectacular that it took her breath away, and Thérèse remembers wishing she could have been on both sides of the train at once to take it all in.  This memory left a deep impression on her, and she felt “as if I were already beginning to understand the greatness of God and all the wonders of heaven.”[8]  She recognized that this moment would help her to keep a proper perspective as she closed her self away forever in the cloister.  “I shall find it easier to forget my own unimportant concerns as I contemplate, in the mind’s eye, the greatness and power of the God whom I try to love above all things.”[9]   It would help her to avoid what she saw as a subtle danger of religious life.  She could see that the religious life was “the surrender of your own will, the unregarded sacrifices you make on a small scale,” but “how easy it must be to get wrapped up in yourself and lose sight of your high vocation.”[10]  Even in a religious life of sacrifice, there is a danger in becoming self absorbed.  Thérèse welcomed this natural beauty as reminder of the smallness of things we do, including the sacrifices we make.

One of the powerful images Thérèse used when thinking about herself was as victim of divine love.  She describes how on the feast of the Holy Trinity one year she was “given the grace to see more clearly than ever how love is what our Lord really wants.”[11]  Turning towards Christ, she writes, “If only you could find souls ready to offer themselves as victims to be burnt up in the fire of your love, surely you would lose no time in satisfying their desire…Jesus, grant me the happiness of being such a victim, burnt up in the fire of your divine love.”[12]  Thérèse gives us an image of a heart completely consumed with love for another.  She holds nothing of herself back, but offers herself completely.

If the Little Way seems difficult, that’s because it is.  It requires you to give your whole self.  But, the beauty of it is that this is the only thing required.  You must love, plain and simple.  Even Thérèse struggled with the seeming smallness of this way of life.  Thérèse describes how she wanted to do all sorts of things.  She would have been “a fighter, a priest, an apostle, a doctor, a martyr,”[13] all at once if she could.  Martyrdom was her childhood dream, but just one kind of martyrdom wouldn’t have been enough for her.  “I should want to experience them all,”[14] she writes.  She describes being tormented by all these unfulfilled longings of her heart, recognizing her own littleness and inability to achieve these great things.  On one occasion she asked an older nun, Mother Anne, “Does God really ask no more of me than these unimportant little sacrifices I offer him, these desires to do something better?  Is he really content with me as I am?”[15]  Mother Anne had to assure her “God asks no more.”  What Thérèse soon came to realize was that charity is the key to every vocation.  She writes:

“If the Church was a body composed of different members, it couldn’t lack the noblest of all; it must have a heart, and a heart burning with love.  And I realized that this love was the true motive force which enabled the other members of the Church to act; if it ceased to function the Apostles would forget to preach the gospel, the Martyrs would refuse to shed their blood.  Love, in fact, is the vocation which includes all others; it’s a universe of its own, comprising all time and space–it’s eternal.  Beside myself with joy, I cried out: ‘Jesus, my Love!  I’ve found my vocation, and my vocation is love.’”[16]

 Thérèse realized that she was not meant to do spectacular things, but that this was okay.  She would be like a little child scattering flowers, missing no opportunity to make small sacrifices,[17] and repaying love with love.[18]  Thérèse accepted who she was and her lowly status, realizing as St. John of the Cross said that “the slightest movement of disinterested love has more value than all the other acts of a human soul put together.”[19]  To love is what she was meant to do.  If she could do that, nothing else really mattered.

The lesson here is that love is lived out in the ordinary and the everyday, perhaps even more so than in the extraordinary.  Moreover, the challenge to love and to self-forgetfulness is not reserved only for certain, special people.  If anything, love is even more important for a person living an ‘ordinary’ life.  All one has to do is be fully oneself.  Each present moment for every person is an opportunity to love.   This is the basic idea of the transformation of the every day, and indeed the every-minute, found in Thérèse is also found in the book Abandonment to Divine Providence.  This book, sometimes titled in English The Sacrament of the Present Moment is the work of a French Jesuit named Jean-Pierre de Caussade.  In it, de Caussade writes that the key to spiritual perfection is found in “passive surrender” to God’s will so that we become like a tool “in the hands of a craftsman.”[20]  We are to submit with humble trust to God, not worrying about the future or anything out of our control, but “reserving for ourselves only love and obedience to the present moment.”[21]  For it is in each passing moment that God reveals His unchangeable, eternal will.[22]  The lesson here is that self-forgetful love is possible for everyone and, indeed, in every possible moment.

            Until now I have speaking rather abstractly, but the point is that this all pervasive love can’t help but have an effect on lived experience, no matter how mundane.  For Thérèse, love took the form of little things like volunteering to lead the elderly and cantankerous Sister St. Peter to the Refectory every evening.[23]  Another good is example is Thérèse’s treatment of the sister who sat behind her in the chapel during the evening.  The sister would grind her fingernails against her teeth, making a noise which Thérèse found extremely annoying.  Thérèse longed to turn around, and just give the sister a simple glance, so that she would stop.  But Thérèse figured the most loving thing to do was to save the sister any embarrassment and keep on trying to pray, even attempting to incorporate the frustrating noise into her prayer.[24]  In another example, when Thérèse would do the dishes with a particular sister, the other sister would always splash dirty dish water on Thérèse when picking up the handkerchiefs from the ledge.  Rather than show her annoyance or even wipe the water from her face, Thérèse learned to look forward to, as she put it, “this new kind of Asperges.”[25]  Thérèse talks about how she would try extra hard to show love to the nun in community whose personality rubbed her the wrong way.  Thérèse was so successful that the sister once asked Thérèse, “What is it about me that gets the right side of you?”[26]  These are just a few examples of the ways in which Thérèse lived out this call to love in the ordinary moments of life.

            You will notice I have pointed out only little ways of showing love which involved some sort of sacrifice.  Of course, one should just as readily point out the more pleasant moments of her daily life which also show love, such moments in her relationships within her family.  These too are important, because they help to drive home the point that love is the key thing, not suffering.  But these small sacrifices connect us back to the theme of vulnerability.  Love, especially in the small and ordinary things, makes you vulnerable in small and ordinary ways.  For Thérèse, it took the form of possibly being subjected to the auditory pain caused by a nail-biter.  Lewis and L’Engle naturally lead us to think of the personal attachments and empathy which we feel for others.  Love means, though often in the smallest of ways, we might feel sorrow at others’ misfortune, the burden of their problems, or the pain of separation.  Love, self-forgetting love, is borne out in every moment and in hundreds of ways.  If this is fully lived out, one also becomes vulnerable in every moment and in hundreds of little ways.

            Up until this point, we have been operating under the assumption that to love is very good thing, perhaps the best thing that we can do.  If this is true, all the vulnerability that comes with love is certainly worth undertaking.  But why should perfect love be the focus, if all I want is to be happy?  All this about forgetting myself and my own wants seems to be moving in the wrong direction.  At worst, love will maximally expose me to all the pain and brokenness of the world.  I’ll love if its suits me, and maybe there are even good reasons even to die for someone, but why even think about making the small sacrifices?

            Certainly no full treatment of this question is possible here, but one suggestion is that personal happiness, living for one’s self, breaks down as a meaning for life.  It may not be the best example, but I think here of the movie Good Will Hunting, where the mathematical genius Will Hunting has no motivation to do anything significant with his life.  In one of the turning points of the story, he has a conversation with his friend Chuckie Sullivan, who, like so many other people, wants Will to make something of himself.  Chuckie tells Will that there is no way they should still be neighbors in twenty years.  You’d better have moved on to higher things, he tells him, because you have that special ability, that “winning lottery ticket,” which no one else has.  Will responds angrily, “Why is it always this? I owe it to myself to do this or that? What if I don't want to?”  “No, no, no,” Chuckie interjects, “you don’t owe it to yourself, you owe it to me.”[27]  Living and thinking only of himself and his own desires, Will could find neither meaning nor motivation in his life.  But once challenged to live for others, he finally found a direction to go.

            Another reason not to make happiness an ultimate goal is more of a psychological principle.  You will never be happy so long as you are trying to be happy.  It’s a bit like the fact that you’ll never be able to fall asleep, as long as you are thinking about how to fall asleep.  Or like the fact that trying to avoid being self-conscious makes you self conscious.  Perhaps the similar gospel principle is relevant here, namely “Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”[28]  Trying to be happy entirely on your own terms simply does not work.  If you want to be happy, forget about yourself, love to the fullest, and happiness will follow.  If this is not apparent to you, one can only say “try it out and see what happens.”

            To return to Thérèse for one final point, Thérèse’s eschatology is very striking.  It reveals just how deep this attitude of self-forgetful love goes.  Thérèse did not look forward to heaven as a place of well deserved rest from her labors on earth.  “I really count on not remaining inactive in heaven,” she writes, “My desire is to work still for the Church and for souls.”[29]  Elsewhere she writes, “If God answers my desires, my heaven will be spent on earth until the end of the world.  Yes, I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth.”[30]  You can see where this eschatology comes from; indeed, one could say that it is the logical conclusion of Thérèse’s spirituality.  But it is still shocking to realize just how powerful love is, transforming and perfecting desire itself, so that we desire nothing more for eternity than to do what is good for others and to reciprocate love.

            The Little Way is a challenging path.  There is no doubt about that.  But this way of perfection is open to everyone.  All it requires is that you forget yourself in total love.  Yes, it will make you vulnerable in a million little ways, but this vulnerability is something to be embraced.  We need look no further than St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus to see how this way of life, this way of love, this way of vulnerability, produces something as beautiful as a shower of roses, namely a saint.

---

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991), 121.

[2] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (Macmillan, 1995), 190.

[3] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (New York: Macmillan, 1924), Book 1, Chapter I.

[4] Thérèse of Lisieux, Autobiography of a Saint, trans. Ronald Knox (London: Harvill Press, 1958), 51.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 51-52

[7] Ibid., 52.

[8] Ibid., 158.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 219-220.

[12] Ibid., 220.

[13] Ibid., 233.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., 232.

[16] Ibid., 235.

[17] Ibid., 237.

[18] Ibid., 236.

[19] John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, commentary on Stephen, XXIX, quoted in Thérèse, Autobiography, 238.

[20] Jean-Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment, trans. Kitty Muggeridge (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1982), 10.

[21] Ibid., 11.

[22] Ibid., 21.

[23] Thérèse, Autobiography, 295-297.

[24] Ibid., 298-299.

[25] Ibid., 299.

[26] Ibid., 268-269.

[27] “Quotes for Chuckie Sullivan (Character) from ‘Good Will Hunting,’” IMDB.com, accessed February 10, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003604/quotes.

[28] Matt. 16:25. New American Bible.

[29] Letter from Thérèse of Lisieux to P. Roulland, July 14, 1897, in Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Volume II, trans. John Clarke, O.C.D. (Washington D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1988), 1142.

[30] Thérèse of Lisieux, July 17, 1897, in St. Thérèse of Lisieux: essential writings, ed. Mary Frohlich (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 117.

Pensées

Sometimes lots of good ideas just hit you at once.  Indeed, it happens to me quite often that I'm overwhelmed with all the good things I want to do, the things I want to plan, the books I want to read, and the things I want to write.  The main problem is they can't all possibly be done at once, so it just leaves me in a frantic rush to do as much as I possibly can and then fizzles out by the time my alarm goes off the next morning and I don't feel like getting out of bed.  My goal here, writing today, is simply to write a few scatter thoughts that have been on my mind, each worthy of a blog post in their own right.  A big problem for me is that I am too meticulous in my writing.  I try almost too hard to express precisely what I want, when in fact no words will be perfect in describing what it is I'm talking about.  I spend too much time trying to find the perfect phrase, etc.  So I am trying to do the exact opposite right here and now.  I'm just simply going to write.  I hope my scattered thoughts you might find interesting, but in someways I just want to get them down on (virtual) paper.  It's quite possible that this way of writing might just be the perfect way to make ideas stick.  Peter Kreeft, philosopher at Boston College, thinks that Blaise Pascal's Pensées is one of the best books ever written precisely because it is unfinished and scattered.  If it had been completed and followed a perfectly logical progression, it would have been ruined.  So God in his mercy killed Pascal before his book was finished.  I don't know whether I agree with Kreeft, but Pensées is pretty good and if I volunteer to write down unfinished thoughts, maybe God will spare my life.

One things that's been on my mind is the idea of self forgetfulness.  There is another answer to the riddle which I proposed in my last post.  The Self.  The only way to find one's self is to completely forget one's self.  Get so caught up in what you are doing, that you become completely unselfconscious.  Self-consciousness is generally a bad sign.  If you are self conscious, you can never truly be yourself in social situations.  If you are self conscious about the kind of job you are doing, you are probably doing a bad job.  To paraphrase Kreeft, no one ever made a good impression by trying to make one.  Just think about the absentminded genius.  They are so lost in their work, that they forget to take care of themselves or they even forget where they are.  Learning to become disinterested to even one's own desires and happiness is moving swiftly down the road to joy.
I love the change of the seasons.  Much to my joy, I've discovered that the smell and feeling of Fall is the same in London, England as it is in Southeast Michigan, or South Bend, Indiana.  The first days of any change in season are always so wonderful.  The smell brings back memories of the same time in years past, as does the feel of the wind or the weather.  Running around the nearby park has brought back memories of playing high school soccer on windy days in October.  It reminds me of my backyard during fall, both in Michigan and even dimly in Indiana, though I was seven or younger at that time.  I think of playing kickball in the backyard with friends.  I think of the leaves falling around the lakes at Notre Dame, and driving up Notre Dame avenue just after Fall break, the golden dome in view.  I am reminded of beautiful faces.  Fall makes me feel lovesick and homesick at the same time.

Friends.  It's struck me that those friendships which I most especially value are those which make me feel completely humbled.  I've been blessed through my life to meet many wonderful people.  Sometimes I just wonder to myself in sort of awe, "How is it that I am so lucky?"  There isn't anything that I could possibly have done to make myself worthy of this friendship.  And so I experience their friendship as pure gift.  Friendship is a gift you give, but more importantly is a gift that you receive.  When I go wrong is when I think "shouldn't these people want to be my friend.  Yeah, I've got lots of great personal qualities."  The reality is that I do not deserve to have friends and that I can't make anyone be my friend.  It is pure gift.  It's about standing in receptivity to the gift of another person.  For a Christian, I think friendships are particularly important because they teach us how to be a receiver, the relationship we always stand in towards God.

I think this bit about friendship ties in nicely with the theme of self-forgetfulness.  In a true friendship, the self-consciousness of meeting someone has fallen away.  You no longer think about thinks like "What sort of questions should I ask this person?  What should I say?  What do they think of me?"  Ironically, it is losing this self-consciousness in relationship that allows one to be oneself and to actually share more of oneself.  Deep friendships have reached the point where sharing deep truths about one's self is easy and natural.  It's as though the barrier of the self has broken down.

What about love?  (Upon reflection, that questions terribly deals with the ambiguity of our language.  Let me rephrase: "What about Eros?")  I have found it difficult to think about marriage in terms of this ethic of self-forgetfulness.  In my present thinking, I haven't been able to see the married state as something which does enough to "draw one out of The Self."  I'm not saying the problem is with marriage, but rather the problem is with my own inadequacy.  When I look a marriage, I see a good thing, a beautiful thing.  There are many things I find attractive about that state of life.  But were I drop everything and get married today, I would be pursuing it as something that I want, something that I think would make me happy.  I want this woman to love me and I want to love her and spend time with her because that gives me joy.  Thought of like this, that is hardly a drawing out of the self.  But like I said the problem is with me.  I've never reached the state (or if I have, I don't remember it particularly well), where I've been so transported by the joys of Erotic love that my own desires have melted away and my self so forgotten so that the 'I' becomes 'we.'  I've not reached that place where lifelong love and commitment becomes not something that I want as I, but as some completely natural and seemingly inevitable next-step to join together a selfless 'we.'  Perhaps I'm romanticising love too much.  However, it does make perfect sense to me when older, happily married couples say that "We've more in love now that when we were first married."  It's because they lived through so much together, and have been required to make so many sacrifices, that they most certainly had to forget themselves and their own wants.  I mean they have made sacrifices not in a petty, "We'll do what you want because it makes me feel good to give you what want," sort of way, but in a way which requires real pain.
(Edit: I don't mean to introduce a discontinuity between friendship and Eros.  Indeed, I think a true romance will inspire a feeling of humility just as a true friendship does, and that romantic love will be experienced as a gift, just as friendship is.  I also think they pose a similar challege, in that both are often initially sought in response to a personal desire, but in both that desire can be transcended.  What I wrote about Eros could easily have been written by someone else about friendship.  Perhaps, I should just retract the whole paragraph.  Nevertheless, I think it is true to say that perhaps because there is greater attraction to Eros and the possibility for self-transcendence is even higher, it is more difficult to initially escape the self-seeking element.  The reflection above betrays the subjective state of the author and should be understood accordingly.)

The last paragraph took me an outrageous amount of time to write compared with the rest of the post.  If it's the worst paragraph, it certainly proves Kreeft's theory.  In anycase, I hope I can return to a more free-flowing style for the last few thoughts here.  The first is, when thinking about self-forgetfulness and such over the past few days, its occured to me that perhaps I should blog less.  While blogging might initially seem more other-directed than simply journaling, for me this is entirely not true.  Way too often I am motivated to blog in part by a vain desire to have others admire what I've writen, combined with a need to share what I am thinking.  But perhaps what is even more annoying, is that when I have an awesome thought, I can automatically think to myself "Boy, that would make a great blog post.  Won't people think I'm awesome for having such a great thought."  That spoils the thought as a thought in its own right, and is pretty vain to boot.  Although, if I decided just to journal about these thoughts, I'll probably still have an intrusive complusion to journal.  Perhaps the easiest solution to allay some of these qualms is to just check my Blogger stats much less often.

Finally, related to the blogging/thought hoarding problem, I've often gotten frustrated in my past trying to obsessively seize with my mind beauty things or cool experiences.  The worst is when I have a camera, which becomes an extension of my mind, and I begin to take pictures complusively, trying to save the memory of what is there.  Not that I discourage picture-taking, but I've found the enjoyment of a thing is often spoiled by trying to enjoy it.  Better just to be receptive and to let things come as they are.  Then you'll be surprised what you can enjoy if you are not trying.

Later Dudes (and Dudettes for those feminists who claim that the word 'dude' excludes 'dudettes.'  Actually, why do some feminists insist that terms like 'waiter' works now for both 'waiter' and 'waitress,' but get really mad if I don't specify 'woman' in addition to the term 'man?'  Perhaps they would get offened that I specified 'dudettes.'  I'm so confused.  And I wish everybody would stop making generalizations.)!