Our lives have grown too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations that we feel we must meet grow overnight, like Jack’s beanstalk, and before we know it we are bowed down with burdens, crushed under committees, strained, breathless, and hurried, panting through a never ending program of appointments. WE are too busy to be good wives to our husbands, good homemakers, good companions of our children, good friends to our friends and the list goes on. We are weary and breathless. Civic duties call our name. Needs abound and good causes are everywhere making us feel guilty. But as we begin to try and be involved in those good causes our dearest and closest ones to us suffer from our lack of attention to them and to those things that in our home we have been called to do as first priority.

We tend to think our great problems are external, environmental. We are not skilled in the inner life where the real roots of our problem lie. For I would suggest that the true explanation of the complexity of our program is an inner one, not an outer one. The outer distractions of our interests reflect an inner lack of integration of our own lives. We are trying to be several selves at once, without all of our selves being organized by a single mastering life within us. We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all. And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed and fearaful we shall be shallow. For over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living that we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existsnce, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center.