Quote of the Day

I've been in a blah mood today - bad sleep, no exercise, and a long to-do list equals no motivation for me. However, I did read a really fabulous quote that I thought I'd share. I think I might just be ready to start getting something done around here now. My wonderful husband is so tolerant of my unmotivated days. Anyway, here's the quote:

"The moment you are aware of your holiness it goes sour and becomes self-righteousness. A good deed is never so good as when you have no consciousness that it is good—you are so much in love with the action that you are quite unself-conscious about your goodness and virtue. Your left hand has no idea that your right hand is doing something good or meritorious. You simply do it because it seems the natural, spontaneous thing to do. Spend some time in becoming aware of the fact that all the virtue that you can see in yourself is no virtue at all but something that you have cunningly cultivated and produced and forced on yourself. If it were real virtue you would have enjoyed it thoroughly and would feel so natural that it wouldn’t occur to you to think of it as a virtue. So the first quality of holiness is its unself-consciousness.

"The second quality is its effortlessness. Effort can change a behavior, it cannot change you. Think of this: Effort can put food into your mouth, it cannot produce an appetite; it can keep you in bed, it cannot produce sleep; it can make you reveal a secret to another but it cannot produce trust; it can force you to pay a compliment, it cannot produce genuine admiration; effort can PERFORM acts of service, it is powerless to produce love or holiness. All you can achieve by your effort is REPRESSION, not genuine change and growth."

The Way to Love
~ Anthony De Mello

I know that quote had little to do with me not being motivated. Really, though, when I get in my down moods, I try to remind myself to look outward, not inward, to get over it. That takes effort, so I am most assuredly not where I'd like to be. However, I would like to be the kind of person who does good effortlessly and without realizing it. That really does seem to be the ultimate expression of being charitable. It's a really beautiful thought to become the kind of person who is not self-interested and is motivated only by love of his fellowman. I guess it gives me something else to put on my to-do list ;)