October 30, 2007 – The pleasure of a good act, writes Thomas Merton, is something to be remembered, not just to feed our ego and complacency, but to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of cruelty, vice and pettiness that often oppose, frustrate and contradict them.
   I have long understood that it is selfish to give. We do it for ourselves, always for ourselves, even if it does good for others. This isn’t false humility, but self-awareness and reality. One reason I love my dogs and animals is that they are dependent creatures.They give me the gift of caring well and mercifully for them. This, at least in theory, can make me a better person.
  Laziness and cowardice are the enemies not only of good acts, but of a spiritual and interior life. Laziness and cowardice put our own comfort above the love not only of what some call God, but as important, of other people. They keep us from knowing ourselves, of being self-aware, of understanding the deep forces that drive and push us.
  And they can cripple us. Paula, along with my friends, have been urging me to go into the woods camping for two or three days, and a part of me doesn’t want to go. I want to get to work, to write more chapters. I don’t want to go shopping, to parcel food into bags, to haul clothes and water for miles, to use an outhouse in the cold, to haul firewood back and forth all day to keep from freezing, to cook food that will soon go bad as ice melts in coolers. I love the farm, and miss it. I miss my wife and daughter, my friends, my own bed, my writing, photos and computer. I want to get on with life.
  But I can’t, at least not yet, because I have lost touch with my spiritual center, and I have to get it back in order to get on with life and write the way I hope to. And I have to leave my life to see it clearly and well. This requires courage and energy. And then, I will love being out there and not want to come back, and when I do, hopefully, that spirit will be renewed, as it has been every time I’ve gone. Laziness and cowardice make me hesitate to go back out there, haul all this stuff for miles into the woods, and sit in the cold and the dark. Merton will come with me, along with C.S. Lewis, Junot Diaz (“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”), and Ha Jin, (“A Free Life”). To me, it is lazy and cowardly to fret and dry up, when I need to conquer the tired parts of myself and bring them back to life and awareness.
    Merton wrote about solitude and self-awareness:
   “We have to gamble on the invisible and risk all that we can see and taste and feel. But we know the risk is worth it, because there is nothing more insecure than the transient world.
   “For this world as we see it is passing away.”