Eternal Echoes

Sometime you read something that stirs a corner of your mind or deeper still tugs at heart strings.  This is one such piece. 

If you were a stone...

If you were a stone, you could remain still, gathered in silent witness in the same landscape. The infinite horizons would never trouble you. Nothing could draw you out. As a human, your daily experience is riven with fracture and fragmentation. You wander like a nomad from event to event, from person to person, unable to settle anywhere for too long. The day is a chase after ghost duties; at evening you are exhausted. A day is over, and so much of it is wasted on things that meant so little to you, duties and meetings from which your heart was absent. Months and years pass, and you fumble on, still incapable of finding a foothold on the path of time you walk.

A large proportion of your activity distracts you from remembering that you are a guest of the universe, to whom one life has been given. You mistake the insistent pressure of daily demands for reality, and your more delicate and intuitive nature wilts. When you wake from your obsessions, you feel cheated. Your longing is being numbed, and your belonging becoming merely external. Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather yourself; you are dragged many directions away from true belonging.

— John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes (p. 8)