“Our culture is obsessed with planning, and much of it is inspired by fear. Heavy scheduling is a formidable way to avoid intimacy. If we are constantly busy, we do not have to face our feelings and deal with our issues I relationships. “Oh, I’m just too busy to be with a woman,” is a clear indication that the speaker is terrified of love and is willing to erect an array of barriers to protect himself from feeling the loneliness that is actually running him. A saturated day planner is often a symptom of weighty denial, and it should be recognized immediately as a warning flag of great psychic distress that is not being acknowledged or dealt with. (The insidious twist in the planaholic’s plight is that nearly our entire culture is heavily hypnotized to avoid intimacy through busy-ness. It is much more difficult to become free when most of the people around you share your form of insanity and call it reality.)
Someone who is heavily overscheduled is usually seriously threatened by absence of structure or quiet time alone. Such a one realizes that given even a little bit of space, she will have to face her feelings, and that kind of intimate confrontation is to be avoided at all costs. Sorrowfully, those costs include aliveness, health, and fulfilling relationships. You cannot be intimate if you erect a calendar as a wall between you and a potential beloved. And neither will you ever get to know yourself.”
Alan Cohen, in “Dare to Be Yourself”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in May 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
