The Rhythm of Life

The professor walked into the auditorium, placed his notes on the podium, and began, “Marketing is about creating needs in consumers. It’s about creating a desire in people that in turn makes them feel that they need your product or service. It’s about making people feel they need things even if they don’t.” He put it in such crude terms and with a straight face. But worse than that, the people around me didn’t even seem to bat an eyelid. I was stunned. I was amazed. I looked around the lecture hall, which held six hundred people and was full beyond capacity. Everyone was writing down what the professor had just said—drinking from the well of wisdom before them.

My father had given me my first education in business many years earlier. Dad had always taught me that the secret to good and prosperous business was to provide a good (or service) that satisfied a real human need. If it was a repetitive need, so much the better.

With all their seduction, deceit, and psychobabble, the modern marketing industry has done a marvelous job of redefining the concept of need.

You may need shoes, but you certainly don’t need a $350 pair of running shoes with a certain brand label on them. You may need a car, but you probably don’t need a $120,000 turbo-charged European convertible. I am not saying that we shouldn’t have these things. I like nice things as much as the next person. All I am saying is, let’s not confuse them with needs.

Now, these may be extreme examples depending on the person, but in all of our lives there has been a great blurring of the line between needs and wants. We do have real and legitimate needs, but they almost never have anything to do with consumer goods.

Our legitimate needs are best understood in relation to each of the four aspects of the human person—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. These needs exist not only in these different areas, but also on different levels.

There are some things we need simply to survive. We call these primary needs, and this category includes the fundamentals that are necessary to sustain human life. Examples of primary needs would be food to eat, water to drink, and air to breathe. Without these primary legitimate needs, our lives would very quickly be brought to a grinding halt. Our primary needs are fundamental to our existence. We need them just to survive.

But this book is not about surviving, and neither is life. This book is about thriving, about becoming the-best-versions-of-ourselves.

Our secondary needs are not critical to our survival. We can survive without them for years in many cases. But they are essential if we are going to thrive in any (or all) of the four aspects of our lives. When our secondary needs are being fulfilled, we begin to blossom and bloom as human beings. The satisfaction of our secondary needs allows us to achieve and maintain optimum health and well-being. Among them would be needs such as regular exercise, a balanced diet, and healthy relationships.

Every day we attend to our primary needs—those things necessary merely to sustain our existence. In many cases we do this without even thinking about it. You don’t have to remind yourself to breathe, you just breathe. You have made a habit of breathing. You do it now by instinct. Similarly, you eat and drink several times a day. You probably don’t have to think too much about it. Eating and drinking have also become a habit for you. You are in the habit of surviving. You take care of your primary needs, because you have to.

On the other hand, we often neglect our secondary needs, either because we are too busy or too lazy or we simply don’t consider them urgent.

The question is, are you satisfied being in the habit of surviving, or are you ready to get into the habit of thriving?

For a moment, think about each of the four areas: physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Which are you thriving in and which are you just surviving in?

Our secondary needs are the key to thriving. They may not seem urgent in light of the 105 things you have on your to-do list today, but they are probably more important than anything on that list.

The first step in our quest to become the-best-version-of-ourselves is to define our legitimate needs. The second step is to create a lifestyle that fulfills those legitimate needs.

We all have legitimate needs. The fulfillment of these needs is one of the very practical ways we can learn to embrace our essential purpose. If we are wise enough to seek their counsel, our legitimate needs will advise us what is necessary to maintain health of body, heart, mind, and spirit.

Our physical body is the vehicle through which we experience life. Our bodies are both very fragile and extremely resilient. Our legitimate needs are most basically understood in relation to our physical well-being, because our primary needs exist in the physical realm.

If you don’t have food to eat, you will die. If you don’t have water to drink, you will die. You may not die today or tomorrow, but you will before too long, and as a direct result of not eating and drinking. Eating and drinking are primary and urgent needs. We have an even more urgent need for oxygen. If you don’t have air to breathe, you will die almost instantly. Other primary needs include sleep and shelter (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on your environment and its climate).

Beyond our primary physical needs, we also have a number of secondary physical needs. Our primary needs are those we need simply to survive. Our secondary needs are those we need to thrive.

If we are to thrive physically, we have to bring these secondary needs into focus in our daily lives. Nothing tunes the body like regular exercise and a balanced diet. When we work out and fuel our bodies with the right types of food, we have more energy, and we are stronger, healthier, and happier.

Too often in our culture, food is seen a source of entertainment or comfort, instead of as a source of energy. Let me ask you something. If you owned a million-dollar racehorse, would you let it eat at McDonald’s? Of course you wouldn’t. If you had a million-dollar racehorse, you would control that horse’s diet so that it was in absolute peak condition. I guess the question becomes, how much do you value your own body? Most people wait until they get cancer or have a heart attack before they remember that they have bodies.

Last year we spent more than $30 billion on diet products. How many diets have you been on? How many diets have people you know been on? I am amazed at how much people talk about diets—how this one works and that one doesn’t.

Let’s have a little bit of truth. Most of us do not need any other diet than a little bit of discipline. The average person knows the things that are good for him or her, and the things that are not. All we need is the discipline to choose the foods that fuel our bodies and give us energy, strength, health, and happiness.

But we don’t want discipline. No, we want someone to stand in front of us on television and tell us that we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want, and as much as we want. As long as we take this little pill…or do this special workout for twenty minutes twice a week…

Our bodies are glorious creations and should be honored and respected.

Regular exercise, a balanced diet, and regular sleep are three of the easiest ways to increase our passion, energy, and enthusiasm for life. They are among our simplest legitimate needs and contribute massively to the well-being of the whole person. Physical well-being is the foundation upon which we build our lives. Unless we attend to our legitimate needs in relation to the physical aspect of our being, our capacity in all other areas of our life will be reduced.

In the emotional realm, it can be much more difficult to pinpoint our legitimate needs, because they are not necessary for our immediate survival. It is not too common to read in the newspaper about someone dying of emotional starvation. Our emotional needs are in many ways subtler, but certainly no less important if we are to thrive.

Emotional starvation, while not life threatening, does have some symptoms. For some of us, emotional starvation can lead to radical mood swings, for others to general lethargy, for others yet, to anger, bitterness, and resentment. The heart suffers and the body cries out. Most of all, emotional starvation leads to distortions in our character and prevents us from becoming the-best-version-of-ourselves.

This is certainly one of the areas I have neglected from time to time.

In the fall of 1997, after four years on the road and more than one million miles traveled, I took a three-month break from speaking and traveling. I spent that time in Austria, just north of Vienna, in an old monastery that was now being used as a college campus.

In Austria, I quickly realized that I had been severely neglecting the emotional aspect of my life. Over the previous four years, I had isolated myself. During this time I was now living in the United States, and my family and childhood friends were all in Australia, ten thousand miles away from this new life that mostly kept me in the northern hemisphere. On top of all that, I had become increasingly skeptical about people’s motives for befriending me in this new time of my life. This was an insecurity that was born out of some bitter experiences. Besides, I was rarely in a city for more than a day, which isn’t the most conducive lifestyle for forming or maintaining friendships.

Apart from the European students, there were more than a hundred American students on campus, enjoying what they called their “European experience.” Every weekend, as soon as classes were over they would go—to Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, and any number of other destinations in Europe. They would travel all night on trains for barely a glimpse of these great European countries. Each week as the weekend drew near, you could sense their passion for travel surging.

Most of the American students went to Austria just for the chance to travel. The studies were a means to an end. It seemed strange. I had gone there to escape travel. I had no interest whatsoever in traveling. I was happier than I had been in a long time just staying around the old monastery on weekends. On occasion, though, I would take the train into Vienna on a Saturday afternoon, sit in one of the squares, drink hot chocolate, and read.

But a few weeks into the semester, a friend I had met a couple of years earlier at college in the United States asked me to join him on a trip to Switzerland. Stuart was from Canada, and he had a unique sense of humor and an enormous appetite and propensity for fun. I hesitated at his invitation—not because of him, but because I had loosely resolved that I wouldn’t travel during these three months. “Come on. We’ll have a great time, we can stay with some friends of mine, we won’t travel with a crowd, it will just be you and me, and we’ll be back by Sunday night,” he pressed. I relented. It was one of the best decisions of my life.

When classes were over on Friday afternoon, we hitched a ride to the local train station and went into Vienna. From there we took the overnight train to Geneva. We just talked, told stories, ate some bread and cheese, drank some wine, and traded songs on our Walkmans. The next day we had lunch on the lake, wandered for hours through the old city of Geneva, and then had dinner with his friend Alex and her family.

It was the strangest sensation—acceptance free of expectation. I felt like any normal twenty-four-year-old discovering Europe. I had been to Europe more than thirty-five times, but never like this. For forty-eight hours I was completely intoxicated with normality. It was refreshing. Exhilarating. Comforting. My relationship with Stuart rose to a completely new level, and he taught me again the great value of friendship. I was reminded that weekend of the age-old lesson that no man is an island unto himself. We are social beings—and relationship brings out the best in us.

Spending time with these people helps us to develop a sense of self, teaches us to participate in the fulfillment of other people’s needs, and reminds us of our deep connection with the human family.

One of our most dominant emotional needs is our need for acceptance. We all need to feel we belong. In the face of rejection, we may put on a brave face and pretend that we can survive without acceptance. And that is true; we can survive without the nurturing acceptance provides. But we cannot thrive without it.

We all have a great need to feel accepted. It is one of the forces that drives human behavior. Our need to be accepted is powerful, and it is astounding what most people will do to gain some sort of acceptance or sense of belonging.

Peer pressure takes full advantage of this need to be accepted. Under the inﬂuence of peer pressure, people do things that they would not do if they were alone (and in many cases would prefer not to do), simply because they do not want to be excluded from a certain social circle. There is perhaps no greater example of our need to belong, our need to feel accepted.

We seek this sense of belonging in hundreds of different ways at work, at school, within our family, in the context of our intimate relationships, and by joining clubs, churches, and committees. Some of the ways we try to have this need met are healthy and help us to pursue our essential purpose. Others are not healthy and can prevent us from becoming the-best-version-of-ourselves.

I have always been fascinated with how many different churches there are in America and the criteria people use to choose a church. For several years I have been asking people, and I am amazed how similar their responses are. Most of them say something like “From the minute I walked in there five years ago, I just felt so welcome” or “I just feel like I belong there.”

We have a great need to be accepted. We need to belong.

With this in mind, it is easy to understand why so many people join gangs and cults. From time to time, you may hear a story about a gang or a cult, and those of us who live in a relatively secluded world may wonder why anyone would get involved in these things. Simple. Just like you and me, people who join gangs and cults have a legitimate need for acceptance and a sense of belonging. They just don’t have the options you and I have.

Young people who grow up in an inner-city environment join gangs because they see it as their best option. The gang provides a sense of belonging, the feeling of acceptance, and allows them to feel that they are not alone in what must be a frightening world. The gang tries to fill the emotional needs that a family should be satisfying. But in many cases, the parents (or parent) are caught up in drugs, alcohol, and crime. Or, in perhaps the best-case scenario, they are doing all they can to pay the bills and keep food on the table. People don’t join gangs because they see a great future in it. They see them as a way to survive. People join gangs because it gives them somewhere to belong.

People join cults for the same reason. We all have a need to belong, a need for acceptance. A cult is just a more sophisticated form of a gang.

Our needs are powerful. In many cases, if they are not fulfilled in healthy ways, they will seek their own satisfaction in self-destructive ways.

The next of our legitimate emotional needs is our need for dynamic friendship. While we certainly need acceptance, we also have a need to be encouraged and challenged to change and grow. Once you become dedicated to becoming the-best-version-of-yourself, the people you will most enjoy spending time with are not those who agree with you in everything you say and tell you that you should be a little easier on yourself…and have that second slice of cheesecake! If you are dedicated to your essential purpose, the people you will want to surround yourself with are people who inspire and challenge you to become the-best-version-of-yourself.

The truth about friendship is this: We learn more from our friends than we ever will from books. Sooner or later, our standards come to rest with the standards of our friends. Nothing inﬂuences us more than our peer group. The people you surround yourself with tell me something about who you are or something about who you will shortly become.

If you hang out with a group of people who want only to watch television, drink beer, eat pizza, and play video games…chances are you will adopt their lifestyle. On the other hand, if you surround yourself with a group of people who work out at the gym four times a week and fill their weekends with outdoor activities…chances are you will adopt their lifestyle.

If you hang out with people who are always going to the drive-through for burgers, fries, and sodas…guess what? But if you surround yourself with people who are interested in looking and feeling healthy…you guessed it, you will become more interested in your own health and well-being.

The people we surround ourselves with either raise or lower our standards. They either help us to become the-best-version-of-ourselves or encourage us to become lesser versions of ourselves. We become like our friends. No man becomes great on his own. No woman becomes great on her own. The people around them help to make them great.

We all need people in our lives who raise our standards, remind us of our essential purpose, and challenge us to become the-best-version-of-ourselves.

Life is a self-revelation. Life expands in direct proportion to our ability to reveal ourselves to others and to the world around us. Yet most people spend most of their lives hiding their true selves and pretending they are somebody that they are not.

We want intimacy. We need intimacy. But we are afraid. We are desperately afraid that if people really knew who we are and what we are capable of, they would reject us. As a result, our fear of rejection (driven by our need for acceptance) and our need for intimacy are constantly at odds with each other.

We must ask ourselves these questions: “Do we provide a nonjudgmental environment for others to reveal themselves to us?” “Do we affirm those we love by complimenting them and expressing gratitude, not only for what they do, but for who they are?” “When others make mistakes, are we quick to judge and ridicule, or do we acknowledge it as a learning experience and part of their journey?” “Are we willing to take the first step and make ourselves vulnerable by beginning to reveal our true selves to others?”

Create an environment where people feel safe to be themselves and reveal themselves, and together you will drink from the springs of intimacy.

All relationships can be measured by our ability to share ourselves with others. We must press beyond the clichés of our common conversation and the facts of our daily lives. If we are to reveal ourselves and enjoy intimacy, we must learn to share and discuss our opinions, our hopes and dreams, our deepest feelings, our legitimate needs, and our fears, faults, and failures. The more two people are able to share and accept without judgment, the more intimacy they will enjoy.

Intimacy is measured by self-revelation. The more you share yourself with others (and vice versa), the more intimacy you will have. The more you hide yourself from others (and vice versa), the shallower your relationships will be. If you are unwilling or unable to share your self, you must resign yourself to low-level relationships.

Nothing satisfies the human person like intimacy.

We live in the age of communication. The communications revolution has been driving the world economy for decades, and our lifestyles are constantly adjusting to the latest advances. Yet the communications revolution clearly has not increased our ability or willingness to communicate on a meaningful level.

The reason we neglect most of our legitimate needs is that they require our rarest resources: time and energy. Relationships are no different.

Relationships thrive under one condition: carefree timelessness. Quality time is now the discredited fantasy of an age that wanted more of everything except the things that really mattered. You cannot schedule quality time with your spouse or with your children. If you want twenty minutes of quality time with someone you love, schedule three or four hours with him or her one afternoon, and chances are, somewhere in the middle of that three or four hours you will have your twenty minutes of quality time.

When I was sixteen, I had a friend back home in Sydney. From time to time he would call me and say, “Let’s waste some time together one day this week.” That was his line, and what a wonderful lesson that one line taught me. We used to go out and have coffee or dinner. We would just talk, and laugh, and share stories. Sometimes we would even share a passage from a book one of us was reading. Were we wasting our time? No, of course not. Those times we shared were anything but a waste of time.

In our busy world, there is a tendency for us to try to contain our relationships in little boxes on our schedules. Too often the time we do set aside for relationships is on the perimeters of our already busy lives, so we approach our relationships without the energy they demand in order to be fruitful and fulfilling.

Relationships don’t thrive under the pressures of our modern-day schedules. All of life’s important relationships thrive under the condition of carefree timelessness. Learn to waste time with the people you love.

Ideas shape our lives. Ideas shape history. We all have a need for a constant ﬂow of ideas that inspire us, challenge us, illumine our minds, teach us about ourselves and our world, show us what is possible, and encourage us to become the-best-version-of-ourselves.

We need a diet of the mind just as much as we need a diet of the body. The ideas we feed our mind today tend to form our lives tomorrow.

Think of it in this way: We become the stories we listen to. It -doesn’t matter if we get those stories from movies, music, television, newspapers, magazines, politicians, friends, or books—the stories we listen to form our lives.

If you want to understand any period in history, simply ask two questions: “Who were the storytellers?” and “What story were they telling?”

Winston Churchill, Francis of Assisi, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler, Bob Dylan, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe, Nelson Mandela, and Jesus each told a story.

If you want to know how your nation will be different tomorrow from the way it was yesterday, find out how the stories your nation is listening to are different from the stories of yesterday. If you discover that the stories we are listening to have less meaning, contain more violence, and, rather than inspire us and raise our standards, appeal more and more to the lowest common denominator, you can be sure that in the future our lives will have less meaning, contain more violence, and be more focused on the lowest common denominator.

We become the stories we listen to. But perhaps the more important question is, what stories do you listen to? What stories are forming your life?

Our intellectual needs are never urgent, so it is easy to overlook them. When was the last time you said to yourself, “I urgently need to read a good book today”? It doesn’t happen. Why? For one, our intellectual needs are not primary needs. If we neglect them, we won’t die. But mental vitality leads to physical, emotional, and spiritual vitality. Everything in our lives begins as a thought.

The reason people neglect their intellectual development is that they associate books and learning with school and work. Most people have very little leisure time, and they don’t want to spend that time doing what they perceive as “work.” One of the great tragedies of modern education systems is that they are failing to instill a love of learning. All too often, learning is seen only as a means to an end. It is necessary to pass an exam, or get a degree, or gain a promotion. Learning, like so many other aspects of modern living, has been violently disconnected from our essential purpose.

Some may argue that intellectually we are more advanced than ever before. This is certainly true, but the nature of our knowledge has become increasingly more specialized. The trend is for our professional knowledge, and in many cases training, to become more and more specific. A narrower base of knowledge necessarily creates a narrower worldview.

Add to all these factors the fact that most people feel exhausted by the intellectual demands being made upon them in the work-place, and it is easy to understand why a large proportion of people like to dump themselves in front of the television for hours each evening after work.

When we take all of this into account, it is easy to understand why most people neglect their legitimate need for personal intellectual stimulation.

At the same time, to neglect our phenomenal abilities to think, reason, decide, imagine, and dream is to enormously limit our potential.

We all have intellectual needs. Our intellectual needs may vary significantly from person to person, and while many are involved in intellectually engaging occupations, we all need other types of intellectual stimulation. In fact, the greater our professional intellectual stimulation, the greater need we have for other forms of intellectual nourishment to create a balance. Besides, it is highly unlikely that our professional intellectual efforts suit our individual needs at each time and place in life’s journey.

In the category of personal intellectual stimulation, we could read magazines about fashion, gardening, sports, finance, music, or any other area of interest. We will be entertained, but it is unlikely that we will be challenged to raise our standards and become the-best-version-of-ourselves. To really stretch ourselves, we must delve into the wisdom writings. Selections could include a variety of philosophical texts, the writings of countless spiritual leaders past and present, and the scriptures. It is in these writings that the intellect comes face-to-face with the most profound questions and truths about the world, creation, God, humanity, and our individual journeys. Wisdom writings constantly hold before us a vision of the-best-version-of-ourselves. These writings seek not to entertain us, but to reveal to us who we are and why we are here. The wisdom writings gently call us out of our comfort zones and challenge us to improve, develop, grow, and live life to the fullest.

Our intellectual needs are many and varied. Most of us have a need for a professional intellectual focus. We all need different forms of entertaining intellectual stimulation. But we must challenge ourselves to move beyond these intellectual comfort zones and to embrace writings that challenge us to ponder the deeper questions, truths, and mysteries of our existence. As Mark Twain wrote, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”

Books change our lives. I believe that with my whole heart. I like to ask people what was the greatest period of transformation in their life. They tell me it was five years ago or seven years ago, they tell me it was when they got cancer or lost their job, they tell me it was in the town they grew up in or in a city where they didn’t know anyone. “What were you reading at that time of great transformation?” I like to ask them next. Nine out of ten times, their eyes will light up, and they’ll say, “I was reading Line1

and that book changed my life.”

In the room where I write in my home, I have more than a thousand books. But on the top shelf of one of the bookcases, at eye level, I have thirty-seven books. Each of those books has had an enormous impact on my life. I can tell you where I bought them, what city of the world I was in when I read them, and what the circumstances and situations of my life were at the time. There are books about philosophy, theology, psychology, business, and history. There are some incredible novels and biographies, and there on that shelf you will find some of the greatest spiritual and inspirational classics of all time. It is in a sense my own Great Books collection.

From time to time, when I become discouraged, confused, lonely, fearful, or simply begin to doubt my life, and myself, I go to that bookshelf. I glance along that row of books, and one of those books calls out to me. I take it from the shelf and rediscover the inspiration that first earned it a place on the top shelf.

Our bodies need regular exercise and a balanced diet, and so do our minds. You have a legitimate need to nourish your mind. If you choose the right diet of the mind, your life will be directed by ideas of excellence and greatness. If you allow the media and secular culture to select your intellectual diet, your life will be formed by distraction and mediocrity.

Books change our lives. Begin your own Great Books collection. Choose books that will help you to achieve your essential purpose and become the-best-version-of-yourself. Make daily reading one of the defining habits of your life.

Only here in the area of spirituality do we come to understand most fully our other legitimate needs—physical, emotional, and intellectual—and gain the insight to live a life that enriches, upholds, and protects our well-being in each of these areas.

Our spiritual needs have a tendency to change as the seasons of our lives change. Each of us has a unique spiritual journey. In different stages of the journey, we have different needs. And yet, there are some needs that are unchanging and necessary in all seasons of our lives—silence, solitude, and simplicity. The way we seek to experience these habits of the soul may change, but all the same, they remain essential to our spiritual diet if we are to find lasting joy in this changing world.

The noise of the world is preventing us from hearing the gentle voice within that always counsels us to embrace the-best-version-of-ourselves. We will begin to hear this voice again only when we make a habit of withdrawing from the noise of the world and immersing ourselves in silence. We needn’t spend hours in silence each day, but nothing brings priority to our days like a period of silence each morning.

Every day life poses questions. We all have a need to search our hearts for answers to those questions. Every day we are faced with a myriad of choices and opportunities. We need time away from all the other voices to discern which of these choices and opportunities will enable us to become the-best-version-of-ourselves and which are merely distractions. It has been my experience that these exercises are performed most effectively alone, in the precious solitude of the classroom of silence.

It is also in silence and solitude that life’s preeminent challenge is proposed to us. Brother Silence and Sister Solitude unveil the person we are today with all our strengths and weaknesses, but they also remind us of the better person we know we can be.

In the silence, we see at one time the person we are now and the person we are capable of becoming. In seeing these two visions at one time, we are automatically challenged to change and grow and become the-best-version-of-ourselves. It is precisely for this reason that we fill our lives with noise, to distract ourselves from the challenge to change.

Commitment to the purpose of becoming the-best-version-of-ourselves is the singular key to living life meaningfully and passionately.

Silence has been a great friend to the extraordinary men and women of every age. Many of life’s great lessons can be learned only in the classroom of silence, especially those that teach us about our individual talents and how we can use them to fulfill our destiny.

For centuries and millennia, the wise people of every culture under the sun have sought the counsel of silence. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician (ca. 580–500 b.c.), wrote: “Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.” Writing about the importance of silence and solitude, Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and writer, wrote: “All of man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” Franz Kafka, the Czech-Jewish novelist, philosopher, and poet, wrote: “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet, and still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Learn to be quiet. Learn to be still. These are among the most valuable lessons in our journey.

We come now to the spiritual need of simplicity. Simplicity is one of the governing principles of the universe, yet with every passing century humanity looks to greater complexity to solve its problems and improve its life.

Who among us needs a little more complexity in their lives? None of us! What our lives desperately need is the liberation of simplicity.

If we learn once again to listen to the gentle voice within, we will hear it counseling us many times a day to simplify our lives. When the voices of the world propose the multiple complexities of modern living, the gentle voice within will whisper: Why complicate your life? Over time we will learn to turn our backs on a multitude of opportunities in order to preserve the peace in our hearts that is born from the blessed simplicity that the world despises.

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify your life and you will find the inner peace that the poets and saints of every age have coveted more than any possession.

Silence. Solitude. Simplicity. Three great friends! They may be the subtlest of our legitimate needs, but when they are honored our spirits soar to unimaginable heights, and we are left only to wonder how or why we ever followed the promptings of all the jeering voices of this world.

When we attend to our legitimate spiritual needs, everything else seems to fall into perspective. Only then are we able to let go of the past, wait patiently for the future, and live with an intense passion for life in the joy of the here and now. We feel healthy. We feel more fully alive. Our lives fill with vitality, and life becomes an exciting adventure instead of the day-to-day drudgery of counting the minutes away.

The fulfillment of our legitimate spiritual needs leads us to place our essential purpose at the center of our daily lives. When silence, solitude, and simplicity become a part of the fabric of our lives, we are much less inclined to neglect our other legitimate needs. Only with the focus, perspective, and vitality that are born from the spiritual disciplines will we ever learn to transform each moment and experience of our lives into opportunities to become the-best-version-of-ourselves. Spirituality brings clarity, direction, continuity, and integrity to our lives.

You already have everything within you that you need to make the journey. You must simply begin to honor the truth you already possess.

We all have needs. We need air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat. We need to love and be loved. We need to accept and appreciate others and to be accepted and appreciated by others. We need to learn, to change, and to grow. We need to remember who we truly are and what matters most. We need.

This is our common bond as human beings. We are not as strong as we think we are. We are fragile. We are not as independent as we pretend to be. A day is coming when we will realize that independence is a myth. We are interdependent. We need one another, and only with and for one another can we live. We are one in our need. We are beings of need.

Our health and happiness are intimately connected. Our legitimate needs are the secret language that unites the two. When we acknowledge our legitimate needs and base our lifestyle decisions upon them, we necessarily live healthier and happier lives.