The Trappist monk Thomas Merton was able to articulate in beautiful language so many of my struggles as a mentally ill person stuck in destructive thoughts and patterns. The following passage from one of his letters (published in a collection of Merton’s letters entitled “The Hidden Ground of Love“) is the Catholic author’s version of “Who Moved My Cheese?“

“There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

“There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning?

“There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed, when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.”