The athlete running around and around the track doesn’t actually get anywhere. All that effort to remain in essentially the same place. And yet, while the terrain never alters, the runner herself changes, growing stronger, faster, more determined.
How have you grown when it has looked like you were getting nowhere?
There is nothing quite like the feeling of creation, of taking basic materials and using your craft and imagination to build something that wasn’t there before. Making something of clay or wood or fiber, of metal or words or sound, we participate in our own creation myth, bringing something to light that didn’t exist before we took it upon ourselves to create. In that moment of creation we become divine.
What do you create?
The ancient Greeks famously came up with a variety of words for love, including eros—romantic love, philia—loyalty and friendship, and agape—unconditional love. Valentine’s Day tends to center on eros, or a sappier kind of greeting card love the Greeks never imagined.
This Valentine’s Day, what kind of love do you celebrate? What word might you invent to describe this kind of love?
In the Catholic calendar, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, forty days of penitence and self-sacrifice that come before Easter. The notion of self-punishment is one that many of us don’t relate to, but sacrifice is really a matter of giving up something smaller for the sake of something larger, as when you sacrifice some comfort by turning down your thermostat slightly in the interests of burning less fossil fuel.
What would you consider giving up, if only for 40 days, for the sake of a larger good?
Mardi Gras—Fat Tuesday—is traditionally a time of license and excess before Lent’s season of self-sacrifice. While there is every reason to impose sensible limits on ourselves, and overindulgence has its perils, sometimes, as Mae West put it, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.”
What will you enjoy to the fullest today?
