our skill QUOTES

1 " When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, " Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls " flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as " being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call " antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, " Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124). "

2 " Christian hope frees us to act hopefully in the world. It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice altogether. Christian hope, after all, does not need to see what it hopes for (Heb. 11:1); and neither does it require us to comprehend the end of history. Rather, it simply requires us to trust that even the most outwardly insignificant of faithful actions - the cup of cold water given to the child, the widow's mite offered at the temple, the act of hospitality shown to the stranger, none of which has any overall strategic socio-political significance so far as we can now see - will nevertheless be made to contribute in some significant way to the construction of God's kingdom by the action of God's creative and sovereign grace. "

― Craig M. Gay , The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist

3 " Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance. "

― , The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing with our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside

4 " Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease. "

― Margaret Heffernan , Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

5 " If I lived, she died, and I'd never find someone like her again. If she lived, I would have to die. No matter how many times I ran it through my head, there didn't seem to be another way out. One of us had to die and Rita didn't want to talk it through. She was going to let our skill decide. "

― , All You Need Is Kill 2

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7 " Oh when our hope be shakenOh when the trouble be overtakenOh when the storm be a token Oh when yet, we understand the solemn ways of our MakerThen shall our peace within be awakenThen shall our peace within be awakenOh when the peace we want, dwindles!Oh when the life we want, is found in the shackles!Oh when the doors of sleeplessness is opened to us!Oh when yet, we are shown the solemn path of our lives.Then shall our peace within be unshakenThen shall our peace within be unshakenOh when the storms of life; seem to triumph over our livesOh when the relation with our maker; shakes at the appearance of the lightOh when life, shows its hazardous side.Oh when yet, we understand the solemn ways of God. Then shall our peace within be unshakenThen shall our peace within be unshakenOh when we rest in the belly of troublesOh when our skill seems not workingOh when the test seems not endingOh when yet, we understand the solemn path of GodThen shall our peace within be unshakenThen shall our peace within be unshakenOh when we are entangled; in the worsened economic lifeOh when the hurdles of life; escalates to the apex in mightOh when our strength fades awayOh when yet, we are shown the solemn path of our livesThen shall our peace within be unshakenThen shall our peace within be unshakenOh when our achievements, be at the apex Oh when our joy, be made perfectOh when we sleep soundly in fervent!Oh when yet, we understand the solemn paths of GodThen shall our peace within be unshakenThen shall our peace within be unshaken "