Living a deeper life. Part 4

Living a deeper life

Part 4: Let the wind fill your sails

I realise (very late on in life) that I am a habitual thinker. I have a stock of favourite things to think about. Very early in the morning, they will spark into life, and I will pick one or the other of them up and run with it again. Or something will trigger a thought, and I will gladly take it up and think it through all over again. I must admit that I enjoy doing this. I am a deep thinker, and I like thinking, but I do now realise that this is not an entirely positive trait, and I therefore become the prisoner of my thoughts – thinking through all the old ones for the umpteenth time – rather than the director of my thoughts, choosing what to hold in my mind and heart today. This is a truly awesome thought: if I have a free choice – and I now see that I do – what will I choose to dwell on now?

Although much of what I think about is creative and positive, I can be dominated by the negative aspects of my personality. They are genuinely part of me, but I tend, in my inmost self that directs what I think about, to collude with those negative traits, rather than putting a firmer hand on the tiller to direct my thoughts to something more positive. The tendency to dwell on mistakes or anxiety rather than put them behind me has already been referred to.  

I am a careful and cautious person. I’ve already noted my hatred of making mistakes. So I have “played a pretty straight bat”. And that’s all good, and much good has been achieved by it. But what if now – directed by God – I can be a bit braver? If I was willing to courageously take chances – and risk failures without being distraught by them – what more good might I do?

Now that I have a greater awareness and freedom, I believe I can better resist the external and negative pressures that have often driven my behaviour, and instead focus on the inward aspect of my personality and spirituality – which are quite well-developed already – to allow that inner well of spiritual living water to direct me. I don’t have to be bossed about or blown about or distracted. What can I find within myself that I can now employ with greater vigour to achieve my own deepest goals rather than more superficial goals, and perhaps set by others? And, of course, when I ask, “What can I find within myself?” I am not at all asserting some individualistic, self-realising form of egotism, I am asking, “If now at last, I truly, deeply sink my heart into the well of God’s Spirit, what is it that might well up?”. If I do not impede it, or neglect it, or give up on it, how might God direct my life? I have always believed that God’s Spirit is like a spring of living water, and I know what it is to drink of it. Yet I have treated it as a well to return to from time to time to refresh myself as I direct my attention to my tasks in the world. However, the promise is that we can experience this spring constantly welling up within us, and so my attention could be always plumbed into these depths, even while engaged in my worldly tasks.