Following my own advice

Do you do this? You are giving advice to someone about something and as you are talking you think....I should take my own advice.

It has happened quite a few times in the last couple of weeks. To further bring this to my attention I have noticed this in others - giving advice that they themselves could take advantage of, but aren't.

It seems that our intellect can know what is to be done, or said, but we can't put it into action. Essentially we don't practise what we preach. Is it fear, or something else? Inertia, perhaps. Is it the belief that the perfect time will present itself if I just wait? Or the magical thinking that things will happen if I just think about it without doing anything? It is a mystery.

I have been reading a wonderful book called 'Winter's Tale', by Mark Helprin. It is written so beautifully that I am always stopping to write down a passage, or sometimes photocopy a whole page.

"The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule."

Winter's Tale is that kind of book for me. And this passage sums up what I truly believe about this incarnation, about every incarnation.

"Someday the curtain of the world would lift onto a sunny spring-like stillness and reveal that nothing - nothing - had been for nought, neither the suffering of all the children that he had seen suffering, nor the agony of the child in the hallway, nor love that ends in death: nothing."

I believe in the Grand Scheme of things. I believe that in this life I came to do something, to learn something, to be something that I will take into my next life.

I believe that in giving advice to others I am always, always talking to myself.

And maybe, just maybe, this is the time I will not only listen, but put the advice into action.

Maybe.

Or maybe I will consider the act of Wu-Wei. The art of trying not to try.

I heard about this concept on the radio on Sunday.

The book. The radio. The still small voice within.

There is a trinity of thoughts coming to me.

Yes, it is time to heed my own advice.