it is funny how things in life connect. here’s the story: basically i have been having a hard time in recent weeks academically, spiritually, relationaling and emotionally. i am surviving in though. just trying to get by. make it to the end. you see, i don’t like this way of life. it is not healthy. it is not fun. it is not what we are purposed for. so much of life is living in the moment. in the present. in the here and now. i am not good at the kind of living. i always find myself in survival mode-just make it to graduation, to next week, to the end of the day. what about the means? what about the process? what about the life in between? and then, i find myself doing all this doing for the sake of impressing other people rather than for the sake of doing, or for their sake, God’s sake or my own. i forget to write because, simply to write. to go for a run, simply to go for a run. so photograph, simply to photograph.

so this past weekend, after a afternoon conversation over blenders, a co-worker and good friend of mine, Benji Brunell, challenged me to do three thing for myself this weekend. so i vowed to stop, slow down, and just do something i enjoyed doing. not to meet an assignment or fulfill some responsibility, but just to DO something for me.

then, i was telling my friend, mentor, boss, life-planner, Michele Mollkoy, about this conversation with Benji and about where i was at in life. so i told her i was trying to understand what self-forgetfulness and other-centeredness looked like in my life right now. “Jeff, i have a book for you to read.” sure enough, it was entitled “forgetting ourselves on purpose.” ironic. you see michele is just like that. she just knows something about timing. she knows when to encourage me when i need encouragment, and how to challenge me when i need to be challenged. she knows when to pray for me and when to kick me in the butt. ah, i am so gratful for her. so she gave me the book to read over the weekend. but the deal was that i had to actually read it. and to prove that i did, i had to make a post about it. so, alas, here we are.

so i read Brian Mahan’s “Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition.” there is so much richness and goodness in this book, but what struck me most wass a simple question: “what are you looking for?” he goes on to quote Thomas Merton. “if you want to identify me, ask me not where i live, or what i like to eat, or how i comb my hair, but ask me what i think it is that is keeping me from living fully for the thing i want to live for.” isn’t that powerful? a tough question, but profound.

here are a few other quotes for the book:

“to study the self is to forget the self and to forget the self is to be enlightened by 10,000 things” – Dogen

“if you wish to be compassionate, study wht it is that you are not compassionate” – Walker Percy

“the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” – Fredrich Buechner

so, thanks for the book michele. good times. i learned a few things…and now, i am off to see if i can figure out how to forget myself…hmmm.