Daily Spiritual Insight from Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks

They joke that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. But actually, talking to ourselves is something pretty much everyone does until they become aware that they are having a conversation in their head.

A news report out of Yorkshire, northern England, spotlights the Lion Inn, a pub and restaurant that offers accommodation high on the North Yorkshire Moors where seven people were snowed in for the past eight days.

A recent Oprah quote of the day from Paul Boese: “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”

But just how does forgiveness enlarge the future?

The answer is by redeeming the past.

That is, what happened in the past proves to be the very makings of our future.

There's a tendency for humans to view behavior that’s less than our best as a mistake we must not just forgive and move on from but also feel remorse for and deeply regret.

A young telegraph operator believes he has fallen in love with the new-in-town beauty Fermina Daza, around the year 1880. The young woman’s father will have none of it.

The couple haven’t spent time together, but the young man writes lengthy letters to her swearing a lifelong love.

Over fifty-one years later, after she has married and lost her dentist husband, the former telegraph operator Florentino Aziza is still carrying a torch for Fermina.

Joseph Campbell once said that sometimes a man spends his entire life climbing to the top of the ladder only to one day realize the ladder was placed against the wrong wall. As I revisit the story of my own life and the paths I have taken, I am reminded of this image. 

I took my first real job out of college in the hi-tech publishing world. I say first real job because it was the first job where I did not get paid in cash or under the table and was given vacation time. The job was as an advertising assistant at a high-circulation technology magazine.