Thoughts on the future

People often ask me, “If I want to have a great future at this, or a great future at that, what's the secret to that?”
We've been talking about it throughout the whole journey: the best way to prepare for the future is to completely embrace the present. We haven't spoken specifically about this in our journey, but in many ways we've been doing this together.
We do need a time every day, set aside, to reflect upon life, who we are, what we're here for, what God is inviting us to at this time in our lives—or expecting of us. And it's that time in the classroom of silence.
We talk about silence and solitude and stillness, and our culture is allergic to all three of these. We live at such a noisy time in history. There's just so much noise. And yet, silence is so powerful, it's so beautiful, it's so transformative, it's so necessary.
Think about great music. Great music is made up of notes and rests, and the rests are silence. I think great lives are the same. They're made up of notes—action. Purposeful, intentional, focused action. But also, they're made up of rests. And those rests are silence, solitude, stillness. We need those. And there's something very, very powerful about all three of them.
Silence. Solitude. Stillness. Make some time for each of these in your life, and what will happen is the action of your life will become more beautiful.

Matthew Kelly