Today's
Meditation:
One
of the most important things that I've learned in life is
that there's always hope. As Dale says here, the key
is to recognize that there only "seems" to be no
hope at all. There is hope, and when we persevere we
may take ourselves to the very limits of our ability to
see and feel hope, but it's at those very limits that our
growth and maturation take place.
It's
very easy to talk ourselves into believing that
perseverance won't help us out a bit, but that simply is
not true. When we keep on trying we're bound to
reach our goals, even if we do reach them much later than
we thought or hoped we would. It's not a question of
life rewarding perseverance, for life is impartial to us
as individuals, but a question of perseverance allowing us
to reach results that seem to be out of our reach.
"The
important things in the world" don't have to be
earth-shattering discoveries or inventions. They can
be simple things that help your family or neighbors to
feel better about themselves, programs that can provide
needed meals to people in your community, ideas that can
raise money for a needy charity in your town. But
they rarely are achieved through quick acts or
spur-of-the-moment ideas. In order to bring them to
fruition, we have to commit ourselves to a course of
action, one that will take more time than we might imagine
at first.
Persistence
is simply a willingness to keep working towards a goal
despite a seeming lack of results. And persistence
is one of the most important elements of a life of
contribution-- it's our decision to persist, and that
decision is all that stands between our success and our
giving up hope. But hope never gives up on us, so
let's not give up on hope.
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