Previous: Chapter 39: Depth
When I am selective about how I live my life, I achieve a deep simplicity, an honesty and purity and austerity, a lack of pretension and hypocrisy, an ease and efficiency of choice and action, a timeless sense of calm focus, graceful proportion, and true integrity, a harmony of the parts of my life, a quiet but undeniable energy, a truth to myself, a moral excellence — even, at times, a share in the divine. What is this except beauty?
When I live in this way, I do justice to the real relation, the underlying theme, the ways of true humanity. I am rooted, centered, immersed, engaged, alive to wonder, at ease with life, at home on this earth, aligned with the beauty of existence. I have, too, a sense of lightness, a grace of motion and thought and action, a splendor in my daily routine, a lovely serenity that so easily becomes a smile directed at everything that is.
There is wisdom in selectivity, and beauty in that wisdom.
Next: Chapter 41: The Fountainhead