The Difficulty of Changing Habits

"The world seems to like the status quo; it resists change despite what the mystics say about change being the only truth. . . . Sameness is one of the great categories of existence. Look at your own life for evidence. On the one hand, you can recognize all the changes and differences from ten years ago; on the other, you can feel your personality, your nature, your ways are just as they always were. New job, new ideas, new city — everything different; but meet your father or former spouse and you are right where you always were — everything the same.

"What power it takes to move one habit — as AA recovery groups have shown; just as it takes power to move one shovelful of dirt from here to there. Little wonder that power can be most simply defined in terms of work done. Work is so hard, the power required so great because of the resistance factor. And that is why changes are so difficult to achieve and so miraculous when they do occur."
— Kinds of Power

Reframing Repetition on the Job

"Why not imagine all the repetitive unprofitable actions of sales calls, number crunching, and office forms as essential to the craft of business, not as undignified routines but as modes of care for accuracy and as signs of vocation. Then repetition will be conceived not as a compulsion, a slavelike dehumanizing burden, but as the easy things become beautiful."
— Kinds of Power

A Theology of Immanence

"Not only persons call for service; their things do, too--the oil changed, the VCR cleaned, the dryer repaired, the message transmitted. Ceremonies of the repairman. Objects have their own personalities that ask for attention, just as the ads show the smiling bathtub that enjoys the new cleanser or the wood siding that likes the fresh stain which protects it from decay. Treating things as if they had souls, carefully, with good manners--that's quality service. . , .

"This idea of service demands surrender, a continuous attention to the Other . . . What if a God is in each thing, the other world distributed within this world.

"Theology calls this distribution of the divine within all things the theory of immanence and sometimes, pantheism . . . service treats each particular thing as carrying its own specific value — including the airplane seat which I am asked to place in an upright position. By treating that seat as if it were animated with its own spirit I will be less likely to rough it up and more likely to show care. A cared for seat will also perform better and provide longer-lasting service.

"A theology of immanence means treating each thing, animate and inanimate (perhaps the distinction no longer clearly obtains), natural and man-made, as if it were alive, requiring what each living thing requires above all else: careful attention to its properties, their specific qualities. This plant needs little water; this wood won't bear great weight and burns with a smoky fire. Look at me carefully: I am an aspen, not an oak. Notice differences, pay attention, give respect (re-spect= look again). Notice what is right under your nose, at your fingertips, and attend to it as it asks, according to its needs. Aesthetic sensitivity."
— Kinds of Power

A Better Way to Deal with Litter

"If things are ensouled, then they too require rituals of disposal which we are beginning to find again in our recycling projects, appropriately called Redemption Centers. Instead of the old punishing puritanical moralisms about dropping litter on the street, we need a new and enjoyable animism that children would be the first to understand. 'Don't throw that candy wrapper on the street' — not because it's dirty or bad manners; not because it's wrong; not because 'what if everybody did that?' — but instead 'because your candy wrapper doesn't want to lie around in the gutter or be stepped on; it wants to be in the trash basket along with all its friends.' "
— Kinds of Power

Your Calling

"For centuries we have searched for the right term for this 'call.' The Romans named it yourgenius; the Greeks, your daimon; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo's intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an imaginal body, theochema, that carried you like a vehicle. It was your personal bearer or support. For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the ka, or the ba with whom you could converse. Among the people we refer to as Eskimos and others who follow shamanistic practices, it is your spirit, your free-soul, your animal-soul, your breath-soul."
— The Soul's Code

Extraordinary People

"Extraordinary people excite; they guide; they warn; standing, as they do, in the corridors of imagination — statues of greatness, personifications of marvel and sorrow — they help us carry what comes to us as it came to them. They give our lives an imaginary dimension. That's what we look for when buying biographies and reading the secret intimacies of the famous, their luck, their errors, their gossip. Not to pull them down to our level, but to lift ours, making our world less impossible through familiarity with theirs.
— The Soul's Code

Imagination and Love

"When we fall in love we begin to imagine romantically, fiercely, wildly, madly, jealously, with possessive, paranoid intensity. And when we imagine strongly, we begin to fall in love with the images conjured before the heart's eye — as when starting a project, preparing a vacation trip, planning a new house in a different city, swelling with pregnancy. . . . Our imaginations draw us ever more fully into the venture. You can't leave the lab, can't stop buying equipment, reading brochures, imagining names. You are in love because of imagination."
— The Soul's Code

Therapy's Failures

"Every time we try to deal with our outrage over the freeway, our misery over the office and the lighting and the crappy furniture, the crime on the streets, whatever — every time we try to deal with that by going to therapy with our rage and fear, we're depriving the political world of something. And therapy, in its crazy way, by emphasizing the inner soul and ignoring the outer soul, supports the decline of the actual world. Yet therapy goes on blindly believing that it's curing the outer world by making people better. We've had that for years and years and years. 'If everybody went into therapy we'd have better buildings, we'd have better people, we'd have more consciousness.' It's not the case."
— We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse

Aging with Curiosity and Courage

"To see the force of character up close, we must become involved wholeheartedly in the events of aging. This takes both curiosity and courage. By 'courage' I mean letting go of old ideas and letting go of odd ideas, shifting the significance of the events we fear. I mean the courage to be curious. Curiosity is one of the great drives of humankind, maybe of animal life in general; it's that desire to explore the world that sets the monkey and the mouse on their risky adventures. For us humans, adventure takes place more and more in the mind. This mental courage the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called 'the adventure of ideas.' 'A thought,' he said, 'is a tremendous mode of excitement.' "
— The Force of Character and the Lasting Life

The Heart's Agenda

"The heart has its own agenda, which comes from its own manner of aging. Individuals — even those on the political right — seem to turn left. We find charity, sweetening, praise. Endowments prompted by gratitude; donations to relieve the suffering of poverty, ignorance, and pain. A dominant theme of late years is giving back, an appreciation of how far we have come, how much we have been helped. We respond to kindness and join societies to preserve historic shrines, old animals, natural sites."
— The Force of Character and the Lasting Life