Day Fourteen

Rule 14

“God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is the fine art of skilled penmanship, where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.”

This one is so beautiful and self-explanatory. What a way to think about yourself, your life. Today someone said reading the posts got them to feel better. Wow. If reposting these rules makes even one person feel better about themselves and their lives, I can't express how happy that makes me, makes this journey even more worthwhile because it's way beyond me. 

In a way, this rule speaks especially loud to that one person today. You are a work of art, and at any given point in time, remember that you are still adding colors to your canvas. It never stops, so never stop. Keep striving! That's what we can do, not just wait, but work on our canvas. There is always possibility and promise as we look ahead. I may be crap at controlling my temper today, but that's not who I was a few years ago. That's not who defines me, and not who I will be in the future. We may be just dots, but we are as important as any other dot in the big picture. 

I also feel Rumi's notion of God sweeps away the constant fear-mongering version we hear about. In this case, He is "fully occupied with you", invested in you and working on your canvas with you. 

The next time you feel like you aren't doing enough, aren't where you want to be in life, feel down in the dumps or that someone got the best of you, remember: your work of art is waiting for you to get back to it. But you can't stop trying! 

I stopped writing for years. Words terrified me, I couldn't even sit down and start to write, the thought alone made me freeze. I can't explain what it was, I suspect part of it was "people will hate it". The couple of things I did write in that time felt like they came through me, not from me, and it was some of my best writing. I honestly felt I had no control over the process, though, and that I was simply a vessel to channel those words through me. The trouble with that feeling is that it's impossible to be consistent with it. You can't wait for lightning to strike again because it might never. Then I had to start writing for work, and the advantage with that was none of it was personally taxing, but it helped me get back into the habit of getting words out of my brain. If you become scared of your art, you cannot expect to be hit by divine inspiration. Your "art" (and it doesn't have to be art, it's anything you love doing) is something you can't live without, so don't ignore it. Life gets busy, jobs take all of our time, our emotions spent on loved ones... if we don't make time to do what we love, we slowly stop loving everything around us. 

We have to find the balance. And then, some days, it's ok to just feel like THIS.