"More enslaving than our occupations...are our preoccupations. To be preoccupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there....It is a mind filled with 'ifs.'"

"Not only being occupied but also being preoccupied is highly encouraged by our society...Their unrelenting insistence that we will miss out on something very important is we do not read this book, see this movie, hear this speaker, or buy this new product deepens our restlessness and adds many fabricated preoccupations to the already existing ones. Sometimes it seems as if our society has become dependent on the maintenance of these artificial worries."
~Henri Nouwen