Tag Archives: Pause to Ponder

The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.

“I am only one.

But still, I am one.

I cannot do everything,

But still, I can do something.

And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”

“If women were convinced that a day off or an hour of solitude was a reasonable ambition, they would find a way of attaining it.  As it is, they feel so unjustified in their demand that they rarely make the attempt…The world today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone…Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.  The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray.  But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves:  that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.  She must find that inner stillness which Charles Morgan describes as ‘the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still’…This is an end toward which we could strive – to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations and activities…The problem is how to still the soul in the midst of its activities.  In fact, the problem is how to feed the soul.” 

-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It’s not complicated.  You are a parent; you have to plan to be available to your children twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life.”

– Veronique Vienne