We are so important?

Sometimes in life, we need to just get off the roller-coaster, take a good look at ourselves and focus on what really matters.  Presently, I feel overcome by work and am overly focused on being perfect in what I do.  The latter is my experience when I am too work focused in life.  These are signs telling me that now is a time for me to get off the roller-coaster.

When I ask someone for his help in a work task and hear myself exaggerating points again and again in overly excited tones, I think to myself that something is wrong here.  When a friend offers some helpful advice on how he cannot hear me properly at mass and I react with blaming the microphone and protesting how much effort I put into each Sunday, I think to myself that something is wrong here.

Yes, work is important but is it that important?  I always highlight for others two things in life:
-Being is more important than doing.
-Control never works.
I know this to be true but I should take my own advice which gets lost when I am overcome by the tasks before me in daily life.

In focusing so much of life on work, on what we do and how we perform, we lose the point of life.  Why is that?  Because we come to take ourselves too seriously.  We see ourselves as mattering too much and when things go wrong or we do not perform up to standard, we are lost and react, or that is me.  Something is lost in the path of performing in life.  Yes, that is the word - performing.  In overly focusing on doing in life, how we perform becomes our main concern.  Then we have lost it and need to act to regain the focus on what really matters in life - our being.  And you know what?  We have control over nothing.  We are not perfect.  We just do our best and try to mange life for good.

Doing and being are intrinsically connected but when doing takes over, what matters is how we perform and no longer what we are doing in life to give expression to our being so as to make our mark in the world.   We just lose perspective. 

I am reminded of this when I see a young child without arms feeding himself.  What a champion!  Why is it then such a world issue for me if ones cannot hear me properly at church?  Their comments tell me something.  Act on them.  Don't despair and react.  We are not so important.  We are not alone on this planet.  The truth is that what really matters is not what we do but who we are and how we love one another.  In that way, we live the best of who we are and enjoy the most of a good life.

So don't just keep moving forward but more often stand back and enjoy the ride.