Week 6 : Find Your Center
“Meaning is the language of the soul.”
Reading: Finish Section III. Again, note any chapter, section or passage that causes your mind to drift away from your reading. Allow this drifting to become an exercise in mindfulness. Where are you being directed? Take control of it and see what you can learn from it.
Kind Action: This week’s action is adapted from the chapter “Finding the Center.” Choose a small object in your life that represents an important part of you. Set this object in a new place this week, a prominent spot that causes you to see it each morning. Consider its importance to you. Through this consideration, allow an idea for a kind action to blossom, be it one for you or someone else. Complete the act in the way it is meant to be done.
Blessings Journal: Reflect in your journal each day about your chosen object. Consider telling the story of how the object came into your life. Or write about your experience each day considering your object. The purpose here is for the object to be at the center of you considering your blessings this week.
Link to Book: “My Grandfather’s Blessings”
Kind Living 
My object is a delicate swirled purple/pink blown glass Venetian vase/bowl, about seven inches high and five inches across with uneven fluted edges. When it was given to me, I tried to associate it with me or my personality, but I could not, trying to understand why that particular fragile object was chosen for me.
The person who gave it to me was Miss Mildred Murray, my high school drama coach and mentor who was instrumental in helping me get several scholarships for college, including one from the Daughters of the American Revolution.
My husband also took Senior Dramatics from her, so she knew us both and we got to know each other right outside her room between classes. I received it when I was 19 years old, a junior in college and getting married.
For over 40 years the vase sat on a bookcase in our house in Massachusetts. I would look at it lovingly every time I dusted it, but I always wondered why she picked it for me. She was a big woman who never married, had a voice like a bullhorn to go with her very strong personality, but she was also kind. This is the woman who picked a work of art for my gift.
Now that I think about it with a lot more hindsight, maybe she saw in me a potential that I would never have realized I had. I think she would have been proud of what I have achieved in theatre, first as an actress, then doing technical theatre before directing and producing. I started teaching in high school and finally became a professional lighting designer for my second career.
We have now bought a house in SLC where no young children might break my beautiful vase. I will put it in a place of honor, perhaps in our bedroom, as a lasting symbol of my marriage of soon-to-be 50 years. Both the vase and my marriage have been in my life for almost 50 years, both amazing things to behold