The Little Things

For better or for worse, at some point in my life I stopped reading so many books. My desire for knowledge shifted to the inner territory of meditation and journaling, with the desire to understand the yogic belief that all the knowledge we need is already within us. I found myself drawn to the notion that all great wisdom can be said in very simple words-if it is really so profound anyone should be able to understand and apply it.

But I also began to notice that books would "fall into my lap" at times I needed to learn something in particular. This happened this past weekend, in a book about small business. In it, Michael Gerber quoted Aldous Huxley, an English writer who also happened to spend the second half of his life studying and writing articles about meditation and spirituality (Vedanta specifically). The quote was:

"They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are."

It was interesting to consider this statement alongside a common karma yoga teaching about how "working incessantly" can be a form of devotion or meditation in action. The difference of course is in how we work.

Gerber sounded like a yogi as he dedicated his book to what he learned from the greatest small business owners who, he explained, "seem to have an intuitive understanding that the only way to reach something higher is to focus their attention on the multitude of seemingly insignificant, unimportant and boring things that make up every business (and that make up every life, for that matter!)." He goes on to say "Yes, the simple truth about the greatest businesspeople I have known is that they have a genuine fascination for the truly astonishing impact little things done exactly right can have on the world".

Here's to doing little things...

Julie