Let Your Life Speak
Parker J. Palmer
We can spend much of our lives trying to become the person we believe we are expected to be.
Some expectations come from others. Family, profession, community, and the world around us all have ideas about who we should be and what we should accomplish.
But there are also the expectations we place upon ourselves. These may be even more difficult to recognize. Over time, we can become so accustomed to measuring ourselves against them that we seldom question where they came from or whether they truly matter.
Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak reminds me how important it is to attend to the inner life.
I have come to believe that letting go of expectations is a necessary part of living. Not because expectations are always wrong, but because we need to discern which ones are worthy of our lives.
And that discernment requires self-knowledge.
Without some understanding of who we are, what we value, and what gives our lives meaning, we may spend years pursuing things that were never truly ours to pursue.
The inner life is not separate from the life we live