personal development on Transience

Transition is one of the givens in our lives, and we only live well, we only manage our lives well, when we manage these transitions well. Our world changes; the circumstances of our lives change. The...

I became interested in the subject of transition outer changes around 1970 when I was going through some difficult inner and outer changes. Although I gave up my teaching career because of those chang...

It isn't the changes that do you in, it's the transitions. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational: the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy. Transiti...

Tolerating absence is, in essence, trusting presence—even when the one who is present to us is not physically present. Think of the two-year-old gradually loosening his clinging grasp to the leg of hi...

We disappear because we are uncomfortable with being in process.

Have you ever heard of "Stein’s Law"? Named after University of Virginia economics professor Herbert Stein, it states: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Do you...

Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It's a journey of discovery - there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self'...

The opportunity for conversion is brief, and our lives are littered with missed opportunities.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty.

Don’t get sucked into short-term thinking. Your struggles will not last forever, but you will.

In the gaps, waits, and journeys of life, especially the traumatic and tragic ones, there will likely be many things, which we do not understand. We have been given permission to live with mystery, an...

Moments of more may leave us with lives of less.

Being is presence.

For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...

May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever hidden or forgotten. May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo. May you sense around you the secret Elsewher...

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical disguise.

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.

Our imagination so powerfully magnifies time, by continual reflections upon it, and so diminishes eternity . . . for want of reflection, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing. ...

The world is full of presence. Every moment of life is crammed full of potential encounters with people and things that are present to us even though we may not be present to them: the presence of a c...

The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them.

[Maturity is] the ability to delay gratification. Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing t...

In the story of grace, the lack of hurry makes room for presence.

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.

The million little things that drop into your hands - the small opportunities each day brings He leaves us free to use or abuse and goes unchanging along His silent way.

Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of your desire.