Simple method of estimating whether a man has actually lived through anything, sit with him in silence for longer than two minutes. the ones who have been through something settle into it like an old animal that knows the terrain by scent. the untested fidget and squirm and reach for something to fill the dead air, squalid little addicts of distraction whose entire inner life amounts to a scrolling feed of borrowed opinions. they have never once sat with the stench of their own unoccupied mind long enough to discover what's decomposing underneath
ever since i started measuring my success by how deeply i slept, how often i laugh, how much beauty i notice,
how connected i feel to God, how frequently my heart feels at peace,
my life improved.
Most people are dead long before they die. They walk around serious, working serious, eating serious, and one day they actually die, and nobody can tell the difference.
I tell you a different way. The way of the child.
You were a child once. You have forgotten. The child does not work, the child plays. The child can stare at an ant for an hour and find a universe in it, and your professor cannot find a universe in his whole library, because the child has not yet been told what is important. The moment you were told what is important, you stopped seeing what is real. Forget what you were told. Look at the ant again.
Then comes play. This is where the strict priests will burn me. They want your spiritual life to be heavy, dark, serious, with long faces and folded hands. I say a real life is like a child who has fallen in love with the world. Light. Laughing. Dancing. You have been figuring everything your whole life and it has brought you nowhere, drop the figuring and the laughter comes by itself.
Drop the seriousness. Drop the performance. Get curious about ordinary things like you used to. And then play with whatever is in front of you, the way you used to play with everything, before they trained you out of being alive.
The World Cup begins tomorrow, and many will watch the matches. Soccer reminds us of something we must not forget: life is not a race to show off on our own, but a path we learn to walk together. Anyone who does not know how to pass the ball, even if they have talent, has not yet understood the game. Anyone who does not know how to live with and for others has not yet understood life. #ApostolicJourney