If you need to decompress after a season of overindulgence I highly recommend INTO GREAT SILENCE. It is airing Saturday, January 1 at 8:00 PM (EST) on EWTN.

In the interim, here is another quote from Paula D’Arcy and her excellently written Daily Reflections for ADVENT and CHRISTMAS

We need monastic rules for our ordinary lives—some small disciplines to admonish us to stop rushing, to get out into nature and look around. We need to sit in the dark or read poetry. We need to be still. We need to experience aloneness apart from our roles.

A complementary quote from Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers:

The best kind of aloneness is expansive and generous. To enjoy your own company is to be at ease not just with yourself but with the everyone and everything in the universe. When you’re inwardly content, you don’t need others to prop you up, so you can think about them more freely and generously. Paradoxically enough, separation is the way to empathy. In solitude we meet not just ourselves but all other selves, and it turns out we hardly knew them.