Spirit shares ageless wisdom with me, but
it seems to require never-ending development.

I obviously don’t have what it takes.
I struggle, as many others surely do,
to live within constraints not of my own
choosing.

Spirit claims that I do choose and am
trying to avoid accepting responsibility
for choices I freely make.

But, how free are we to make choices
when the choice I seem to need to make
is the lesser of two or more otherwise
unacceptable choices? Spirit is unimpressed
with my whimpering. It doesn’t move him.

Constraints, He tells me, are necessary to future
progress in any discipline or area of human
development, including spiritual, intellectual,
or material, in that they provide challenges to
our present level of skill, as well as serving to
soften our ego’s otherwise smug sense of
satisfaction in the moment of victory.

Challenges that we have faced and overcome
seem to whisper to our inner ear,
perhaps we should raise the bar.