September 13
Let one thing delight and refresh you: to pass from one deed for the common good to another deed for the common good.
Meditations VI,7
Listening mode
Let one thing delight and refresh you: to pass from one deed for the common good to another deed for the common good.
Sometimes you recover best not during a break but over a task that isn't your own. You have spent an afternoon brooding over something that concerns only you. Then someone asks you to explain something to them quickly, and ten minutes later you are more awake than before. For that stretch of time your own problem had no room, and it didn't demand any either.
This refreshment has little to do with generosity. You aren't giving away anything you then have to go without. Rather, for a while, you are relieved of yourself.
That is precisely why it can become seductive. As long as you move from one useful thing to the next, you never have to ask yourself what you would do if nobody needed anything. Helpfulness is a place where you can hide well, exactly because others are so glad to see you there.
From the outside the one can't be told from the other, and not always from the inside either. Perhaps it shows on an evening when nobody needs anything from you, and in how long you can leave it that way.
