The struggles of a lifetime

Sometimes when I need inspiration, I find it.

Why do I keep fighting the same battles? Why do I have to constantly remind myself that I really do want to eat vegetables instead of chocolate, that sometimes I talk too much, that feeling depressed doesn’t solve my problems?

When I flipped through a book by Joan Chittister in the bookstore, I found that this wise woman was talking directly to me.

“The real struggles of life are, more often than we care to know, the struggles of a lifetime,” Chittister writes in Welcome to the Wisdom of the World and Its Meaning for You. “They are embedded in us like thorns in the flesh….They are the petty little angers that accumulate within us and then overflow into all the other areas of life, into our reactions to the demands of children, to the insinuations of the in-laws, to the expectations of the workplace, even to the claims of those we love.

“They are the lusts we damp down and struggle to smother—the cigarettes and alcohol, the food and the smut, the irrational wants and destructive desires that reemerge relentlessly….

“The thing we fear to face, the thing we aren’t told, is that the struggle with ourselves is the work of a lifetime….

“If the question is: ‘What is wrong with me? Why can’t I change?,’ the answer may be that I have to decide to begin. When the struggle will finally end, what the end will look like, we cannot know. We can know only that the beginning to begin is the secret.”
–Joy