By Brian Doyle-http://www.vocationnetwork.org/articles/show/538-discern-the-real-you
God rarely makes booming announcements about what you should do with your life. Quite the opposite, it takes a lot of quiet to hear God inside you:
Discernimento. It means, according to an Italian friend, not making a total and complete fool of yourself.
He and I were talking about the word discernment in its various contexts, and how both of us, growing up Catholic, thought vaguely that the word meant waiting around to be picked for the holy all-star team with the same shout I Am Who Am! that Moses got.
Later, though, I learned that the discernment meant something like downshifting, and listening, and pondering, and praying, and pausing, and contemplating, and waiting a moment before doing something headlong. I suppose it means, if we are really blunt, trying to listen to something we cannot explain very well.
It was terrifying to ask a woman to marry me. Sitting quietly, trying to listen to the very deepest music inside myself, I came to know that she was the woman to ask, even as I also knew, full well and beyond a doubt, that marriage to her would be complex and bruising sometimes, confusing and painful, tense and strained, and there was no assurance of it lasting. But it would be deeper, in pain and in joy.
How do you make the choices of big questions and small questions in life? How do you listen to the Voice? My quiet, muddled advice: Be silent. Hide your phone. Sit near the sea or a river or a forest. Lose your ego. Turn off your brain. Take off your masks, gingerly, one by one. Bow gently to those you love and then ignore them. Be still. Stop thinking. Do not measure and calibrate and gauge. Let go. Listen to the birds. After a while, you will lose track of the time, and after another while, sometimes, you will know. Don’t leap up, and don’t immediately put it in words. Enjoy the moment. It’s hard to get to that blessed country, and I find it pleasant to linger. Best of luck.
Remember to say thanks to Whatever it is that we are talking about. You and I know what we are talking about, but some things are better left unnamed so we can hear them better. Words sometimes get in the way.
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