Beginning to Pray Part I

Over the next few days, I'm going to post a brief section from a longer passage in Anthony Bloom's spiritual classic Beginning to Pray. I just read this whole section this morning and it is deep stuff. I'm feeling compelled to share it with others. I hope others are reading this.

"There is a passage in Dickin's Pickwick Papers which is a very good description of y life and probably also of your lives. Pickwick goes to the club. He hires a cab and on the way he asks innumerable questions. Among the questions, he says 'Tell me, how is it possible that such a mean and miserable horse can drive such a big and heavy cab?' The cabbie replies 'It's not a question of the horse, Sir, it's a question of the wheels', and Mr. Pickwick says 'What do you mean?' The cabbie answers 'You see, we have a magnificent pair of wheels which are so well oiled that it is enough for the horse to stir a little for the wheels to begin to turn and then the poor horse must run for its life.' Take the way in which we live most of the time. We are not the horse that pulls, we are the horse that runs away from the cab in fear of its life.
Because we don't know yet how to act without an outer reason, we discover that we don't know what to do with ourselves, and then we begin to be increasingly bored. So first of all, you must learn to sit with yourself and to face boredom, drawing all the possible conclusions."