"Break with the situation"

Hugh Prather, in his book, "Spiritual Notes to Myself" comes to a rather
interesting conclusion about our own desire to engage in the development of our own contemplative practice, or in his simple way of cancelling religious sounding words--our own "capacity for stillness"...
Prather quips, "If you love your inner peace, you must learn to "break with the situation".
If you need to pray, then PRAY NOW. "Oh, but that might be awkward", or "that is too much trouble", we say to ourselves.
However, just think about it--if you have diarrhea, don't you do everything possible to "break with the situation"?
We will get up from the meeting. We will get out of line. We will pull the car over to the side of the road. We will excuse ourselves from the dinner table. We will put down the phone."
As my former Pastor Julie PR would say when she began to sense herself becoming overwhelmed by a situation--"I need to set this aside for while"...

There is no need to allow circumstances to create a state of intense anxiety within you. Break from the situation!
It is a matter of how you value your inner peace. When you view the absolute necessity of stillness within, or prayer as a "break from the situation", one simply needs to re-adjust his or her values/priorities and make the peace of God in our hearts as important a priority as he or she makes breaking from the daily routine for diarrhea!

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