{"id":4878,"date":"2017-01-30T16:09:37","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T21:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/?p=4878"},"modified":"2017-01-30T17:10:22","modified_gmt":"2017-01-30T22:10:22","slug":"365139-its-not-virtue-just-timely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/365139-its-not-virtue-just-timely\/","title":{"rendered":"365+#139:\u00a0Beyond Virtue-Timeliness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christmas has come and gone. That means that we have gratefully received some nice gifts \u2013 often clothes. This also means that a natural consequence is the timeliness of giving away older things that are no longer needed or wanted. This is not bad, but it\u2019s also not sacrificial giving. As I looked over the container in which I put items to donate, I figured there were enough things to say \u201cYes\u201d when the Viet Vets call came asking for donations. It\u2019s quick, it\u2019s easy, it\u2019s painless.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I had collected 31 items:
\nA pair of shoes, 2 belts, 5 knit shirts, 15 tops, 5 dress shirts, 1 pair of jeans, 1 fleece jacket, and 1 water bottle.<\/p>\n

The strange thing I noticed was that only 2 of these items were mine. The rest were things that other family members no longer wanted.<\/p>\n

Now I could look at this several ways:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. How nice that my message of passing things on was seeping into the consciousness of my family<\/li>\n
  2. How sad that I didn\u2019t have many of my own things to add to my collection<\/li>\n
  3. Perhaps I had already pruned my possessions enough that I was beyond the obvious choices.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It\u2019s times like this that I make a conscious decision not to give time to figuring out if I\u2019m giving enough, but rather just keep giving. Trying to be too pure and virtuous about the details can tie up my mind\u2019s energy. In these troubled times I need to free my energy to pay attention to the truly major political issues like caring for the poor, healing relationships, and protecting the environment. It\u2019s nice when the \u201cgiving away\u201d dimension of my life can go on auto-pilot.<\/p>\n

    How have you been dealing with feeling like world problems are getting out of control and I don’t know what to do about it?
    \nTo paraphrase an old standby: Observe, Pray, Plan, Act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Christmas has come and gone. That means that we have gratefully received some nice gifts \u2013 often clothes. This also means that a natural consequence is the timeliness of giving away older things that are no longer needed or wanted. This is not bad, but it\u2019s also not sacrificial giving. As I looked over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,38],"tags":[25,13,17],"class_list":["post-4878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-days-365","category-the-process","tag-christmas","tag-clothes","tag-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4878"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4884,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878\/revisions\/4884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}