When I was a new devotee, we went in to meet Prabhupāda in his room. The Temple President very proudly introduced us as his saṅkīrtana team and told the scores for book distribution. Prabhupāda immediately said to us, "You must also read my books. I've not written them just for selling." He went on from there and said more, but I got from that that he wanted us to balance our lives, and we have to be self-determining. That one statement he made so directly and sternly empowered me a lot through a lot of the times, especially in the early days, when everyone was in emergency mode 24/7. I always took my time to read because Prabhupāda told me to, and to have a dose of that is helpful.

Now, ISKCON is a community, it's a society, and we want to do a lot of service. It's nectarian to do service, and there's unlimited service to do. Unless you're in a situation where somebody is very thoughtful in meting out service that you take, you have to be a little careful yourself to make sure you don't take on too much and you don't take on too little either. If you take on too little and you get in the mode of, "Well, I'm a Bābājī now," then that can turn into something else. So you have to balance, self-regulate, and be careful if you don't have that already.

One of the reasons is, from my own experience, if people notice that you're talented in some way (of course, it couldn't apply in my case, but I'm talking about other people), if they notice that you can get things done in a certain way, you have some life, they'll just say, "Hey, can you do this? Can you do that?" Rarely do they say, "Do you have a timesheet that tells how much time you're using already?" And so, you have to learn some techniques of saying "No" first, and then think about it and see if it fits into your schedule.

After all Kṛṣṇa says: "yukta-hāra-vihārasya yukta-ceṣṭasya karmasu yukta-svapnāvabodhasya yogo bhavati duḥkha-hā." Yukta means to be balanced in the way that you approach everything in your life, and that can change from era to era, and obviously from community to community. So the fact that you feel a little confused about it is not out of the ordinary. The human condition is quite confusing anyway. There's never a time when there's not some conundrum causing a spin in your head where you're trying to figure out how to manage, because we're really in a liminal state here in human life, and it always requires repositioning constantly to try to figure out how I should do now. Besides that, just someone once told Prabhupāda...

Verse: https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/2/10/10/

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Add to your wisdom literature collection:

https://iskconsv.com/book-store/

https://www.bbtacademic.com/books/

https://thefourquestionsbook.com/

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