Self-Improvement
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There is a strange irony in how much effort we often expend trying to improve ourselves, heal ourselves, transcend ourselves, or finally “arrive” somewhere better. We strive. We seek. We discipline. We work endlessly upon ourselves, only to discover years later that the very self doing all the striving has become exhausted.
And then another irony quietly appears. Sometimes it is precisely within that exhaustion — when effort begins to fail us, when certainty softens, when striving no longer seems capable of delivering what we hoped — that something unexpected begins to open. The spiritual teacher Rhondell refers to this as “re-evalution,” a kind of inward shift that becomes possible only after the familiar structures of effort and self-management begin to loosen. It is often there, amid weariness and even futility, that Grace finally becomes visible.
Perhaps Grace was never absent from the process at all. Perhaps even the striving, the exhaustion, the longing, the collapse, and the surrender were themselves held within something larger than we could recognize at the time. Maybe Grace is the entire unfolding.
Perhaps this is why the ancient wisdom remains so profound. In all things give thanks.
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