Category: everyday life

Busyness, Illusions, and Sanity.

A Lesson in Realizing the Importance of God.

  • The bustle of our modern lives has led us to believe a fundamental lie, that action equals progress.
  • Constant action can masquerade as productivity, giving us the illusion of progress.
  • The illusion of progress produces the opposite effect.
  • Busyness comes at the cost of the things that are most important to us: peace, connection, contribution, and fulfillment.
  • Busyness also burdens us with anxiety, exhaustion, and disconnection from those around us.

How do we free ourselves from this vicious cycle of useless doing?  We need a way that helps us live in the presence of God every day.  A daily method that is easy to remember, brings results we can see, and we love to do day in and day out.

In the end, the cure for our frantic striving isn’t found in doing more, but in remembering what all our doing was supposed to be for in the first place.  The world insists that motion equals meaning, that busyness is a badge of honor, that a crowded calendar proves a purposeful life.  But the soul knows better.  It longs not for speed but for depth; not for noise but for presence; not for constant activity but for a grounded awareness of God woven through the ordinary hours.  When we slow down enough to live consciously in that presence, we begin to reclaim the peace we surrendered, the connection we neglected, and the fulfillment we postponed.  A simple daily practice, one we can remember, repeat, and genuinely love, becomes the doorway out of empty motion and into a life shaped by intention rather than impulse.  Progress, it turns out, isn’t measured by how much we do, but by how deeply we live and put God first about all worldly things.

 

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Books That Form Us – #3.

Third in a Series of My Book Reviews.

 Good books do more than entertain; they shape the soul in ways that are subtle yet profound.  Here are the books I read between July through September 2026.

✒️.The Children’s Kraft Shop by Adelia Belle Beard (1914).

This illustrated book from 1914 is filled with fun and educational crafts for children.  It is written as a story, with a brother and sister having conversations as they figure out how to create pinwheels, trolleys, airships, cars, and the like using items found around the house. It took me about a half hour to run through it. The illustrations are clear and useful.  This is in the public domain.  (Project Gutenberg).

 ✒️ The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century by Holbrook Jackson (1922).

Surprisingly, this was quite dry reading but interesting enough (there were pockets of interesting information here and there).  (Project Gutenberg).

✒️.The Facts About Rejuvenation by Max Fishbein (1926).

Well, this is wild thinking in this Blue Book, but it was entertaining to read.  I am not really sure what to make of it with its talk of glands, radium, light, glandular rejuvenations, animal experiments, and as I said, this was entertaining, but I took a lot of it with a grain of salt. (Project Gutenberg).

✒️ How to Become Mentally Superior: What Makes One Rise Above the Average by Henry M. La Chateliler (1929).

What moved me to pick up this book was the title; I just had to see what this was all about.  It started with the assertion that “The most striking characteristic of great men is their zeal for work. None of them observed the eight-hour day, no matter what the field of their activities. We may cite as examples great statesmen, such as Napoleon or Louis XIV; . . . Victor Hugo or Lamartine . . . Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci . . . Lavoisier or Pasteur . . . Bessemer or Siemens.”  The book goes on to state that besides becoming a slave to one’s worldly passions, also important are industry, imagination, judgment, and training.  In conclusion, the author asserts that “The family should set a good example to the younger children and inculcate a taste for toil; the secondary school must develop imagination and common sense; and finally the colleges and universities must impart training.”  This is a very short book, with about 32 pages.  (Project Gutenberg).

✒️ Dying to Be Beautiful: The Fight for Safe Cosmetics by Gwen Kay (2005).

Fascinating history of cosmetics in the twentieth century that reads like a college dissertation.  It was sort of interesting because I already knew much of what was written from reading elsewhere over the years.  (Internet Archive).

 

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