Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity and experience as such. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt. But the purity of our conscience has a natural proportion with the depth of our being and the quality of our acts: and when our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the quantity of our acts without perfecting their quality. And so we go from bad to worse exhaust ourselves empty our whole life of all content and fall into despair.
There are times then when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.
We must first recover the possession of our own being.
Thomas Merton
No Man is and Island, p 123
