Discernment is based on the awareness that we cannot always have what we want, true, but also that there is enduring, sometimes hidden, always surprising spiritual value in what we do have. Discernment asks us to love many things for many different reasons and to choose what is the best of them for this instance.

Scarred  by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Joan D. Chittister

It is possible to befriend uncertainty, to remind yourself and others of the fluid, ever changing nature of things. To remain awake to all possibilty.

Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

Each day move to a refreshing and renewing place within, a place where you are in silence, solitude, and wrapped in gratitude. Set aside at least two minutes of quiet time in the morning for perspective to take root. When this can be longer it will be wonderful, but it should never be absent, even when you are busy. Always take at least two minutes to stop and center yourself. Return to this interior place during the day and for a few minutes in the evening if possible.

Robert J. Wicks

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Frederick Buechner

When leadership is defined not as a position you hold but as a way of being, you discover that you can lead from wherever you are. - Rosamund Stone Zander, The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life

“You must build your life as if it were a work of art…..”

I Asked for Wonder by Abraham Joshua Heschel

One of the things I love about the new elders who exemplify this kind of freedom is that they have found a new energy in their choices. I don’t mean that they are fearless or smug. I mean that they know and respect who they are and they have found a new richness in their inner growth. They have found that the second half can be about far more than the preservation of their first half; that it can be about the ripening of their finest and wisest self.

Finding Your Way in the Second Half of Life by Richard J. Leider

Doing one thing at a time is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention. This is surrendered action, empowered action.

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

Only God can say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give God the benefit of believing that God’s hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Teilhard De Chardin, SJ

It is not so much what we do but what we are that allows God to live in the world. When the presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, divine life is pouring into the world.

Father Thomas Keating