The wonderful @GeorgeCheney shared this brilliant quote when I shared my tendency to 'boom and bust' with my work ethic:
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence....
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...To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
@emi thank you for this. One of my favorite books. Thank you for elevating it at a moment like this.
@emi I'm amused because as I clicked through to the second toot, before I saw the attribution, I thought "this reminds me of what Thomas Merton said about the fetishism of immediate results"