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26 July 2022
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Simple and Profound
Thoughts
(from simpleandprofound.com) |
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Of course there is no formula for success
except, perhaps,
an unconditional acceptance
of life and what it brings.
Artur Rubinstein
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step
to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.
William James
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Growth
begins when we start
to accept our own weaknesses.
Jean Vanier
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The
great secret of power is never to
will to do more than you can accomplish.
Henrik Ibsen |
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Watch
Your Thoughts (an
excerpt)
Richard Carlson
The idea of watching your thoughts might sound odd at
first, but you will soon see that this is a very
accurate description of a very useful tool. And
once you get the hang of watching your thoughts, it
will become one of the most powerful tools available
to you.
This technique has been around for as long as people
have been meditating. Watching your thoughts is
a small change that offers you the amazing opportunity
to stop the wheels from turning every second and gain
critical perspective. The payoff will change
your life for good. Here's how it works.
The technique itself is not complicated, and don't let
anyone convince you otherwise. Imagine going to
a theater and watching a movie. You can be
completely immersed in the movie and yet a part of you
is totally detached. If you're watching the
latest horror movie about giant sea monsters, you
obviously don't feel compelled to bring scuba tanks
and underwater guns to the theater. Why?
Because you are detached enough to know the movie is
just a movie.
When you start watching your own thoughts as you would
a movie, the same detachment allows you to witness the
many thoughts that occur in your brain, but without
being overcome by these thoughts.
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What you come to realize is that you have an infinite
number of thoughts every day, and many vie for your
attention simultaneously. It's as if one is yelling
out to you, "Pay attention to me," while another
is saying, "No, pay attention to me." This
realization, like the scary movie, can be
frightening. The good news, however, is that, just
like the movie, these are only thoughts. And as you
watch thought after thought enter your mind, you realize
that you can quiet the inner noise they make. This
is where the importance of detachment comes in.
Over time, and with a little practice, you can get to the
point where you treat your own thoughts much like the
movie you watch at the theater. You can be totally
responsive to them, yet detached enough to keep your
bearings and not allow your thoughts to drive you nuts.
Let me give you an everyday and personal example of how
watching your thoughts works. A few weeks ago, two
very dear friends of mine separately asked me to do them a
favor on the same day. At first I welcomed the
chance to help out. It's rare that either of these
friends asks me to do anything for them, and both are
always there for me. The problems was that both
favors were being "called in" at exactly the
same time! There was no way around it. If I
was to help one friend, I would have to let the other
friend down.
Obviously this wasn't a life-or-death dilemma, but you can
probably imagine what my mind started to do. My
thoughts began going in about six different directions,
and each thought seemed perfectly logical as it called out
to me, "This is why you should do it this
way." Then, not a tenth of a second later,
another thought would jump in and say, "But, Richard,
you can't possibly be there for John; he's never once not
been there for you." When I imagined saying no
to both requests, a few self-loathing thoughts sneaked
into the mix, such as "How can you possibly be so
selfish?"
Fortunately, about five minutes into this potentially
endless agony, I remembered the technique of watching my
thoughts. Instead of engaging my thoughts any
further, I simply started to observe them. It was as
if I stepped back and removed myself from the
picture. I did nothing else but watch. Within
a few minutes my thoughts began to slow down. My
mind quieted, and the situation seemed less like an
emergency.
Shortly thereafter, I knew it would all work out just
fine. I trusted that I would make the right
decision, which, as it turned out, I did. I was able
to be with one friend and, explaining the situation, had a
heart-to-heart phone conversation with the other.
Every day we must deal with hundreds of competing
thoughts. The small change we can make is to stop
trying to engage every thought that pops into our mind and
stop trying to figure out every drama in our mind.
Instead, we can simply step back and watch the show.
It's really just like watching that movie on the screen.
You can go as far as you want to with this
technique. It can be a tool you use on occasion to
deal with the stress that builds up during the day.
Or you can make it an integral part of your everyday life.
The next time you become agitated, worried, harried, or
simply unable to focus, step back and watch your
thoughts. The results will amaze you. With
just this subtle shift, you can move from stress and
uncertainty to resolution, calm, and joy.
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The Search (an excerpt)
Arthur Gordon
It was one of those curiously aimless Sunday
afternoons that every family knows. I had driven
the children out into the country to look for
pinecones and acorns; any objective is better than
none! Their mother had a touch of flu; I was
mainly interested in letting her get some rest.
So we were on our own, the kids and I.
It was one of those hazy autumn days we get sometimes
in the Deep South when no wind stirs and the dust
motes hang like golden smoke in the soft air. It
was also one of those days when I was feeling
depressed. No single, overwhelming
problem. Just a combination of things. A
friend had done me an unkindness, or so I
thought. A promising writing assignment had
fallen through. There was, inside our family
circle, a corrosive little problem of human
relationships that stubbornly refused to yield to
reason or common sense.
These things kept eddying through my mind, and just
about sundown we came across a place that seemed to
fit my mood perfectly: a forgotten cemetery in a
quiet oak grove, lichen-covered headstones tilted
fantastically under a ghostly canopy of Spanish
moss. The children ran around like a pack of
hounds, making a game of finding the oldest
date. ("Hey, look, an 1840!" "Ha,
that's young. Here's an 1812!") I
stood by one of the weathered stones and
watched. Disturbed by the shouts and laughter, a
big brown owl drifted out of a magnolia tree and
vanished on reproachful wings. Don't be
upset, old owl, I said to him in my mind; children's
voices don't trouble the dead.
The stone beside me marked the resting place of
somebody's BELOVED WIFE who died in 1865 OF A
FEVER. Beneath her name was a line of script,
almost indistinguishable. I looked closer,
wondering which biblical phrase her grieving children
might have chosen. But it was not a quotation;
it was a statement: EVER SHE SOUGHT THE BEST,
EVER FOUND IT.
Eight words. I stood there with my fingers on
the cool stone, feeling the present fade and the past
stir behind the illusion we call time. A century
ago this woman had been living through a hideous
war. Perhaps it took her husband from her,
perhaps her sons. When it ended her country was
beaten, broken, impoverished. She must have
known humiliation, tasted despair. Yet someone
who knew her had written that she always looked for
the best, and always found it.
It's strange, sometimes, how a single phrase will
haunt you. As we walked back to the car through
the gray twilight, I could not get this one out of my
mind. EVER SHE SOUGHT THE BEST. There was
courage in the words, and dignity, and purpose.
And a kind of triumph, too, as if they contained a
secret of inestimable value. What you look for
in life, they seemed to be saying, you will surely
find. But the direction in which you look is up
to you.
The station wagon was waiting by the side of the
road. As the miles fled past, I found myself
thinking of the things that had been bothering
me. They were real enough, but now I saw that I
had been focusing, not on the best, but on the
worst. Where my friend was concerned, what was
one misunderstanding compared to years of
affection? The lost assignment was
disappointing, but there would be others. The
family difficulty was a rocky little island, but after
all, it was surrounded by an ocean of love.
We were home at last. The children straggled in,
tired now, ready for their supper. I looked at
the house and thought of the worries I had often
entertained there like honored guests, inviting them
in, spreading banquets before them, giving them a
preposterous preference over all the good things the
same house contained. Perhaps, I told
myself, you've learned something today: SEARCH
FOR THE BEST.
The living room was familiar and quiet; the chair was
an old friend; the fire muttered in the grate. Search
for it? I said to myself. You don't have
to search very far. No one does. It's
around us all the time, the goodness, the abundance,
the wonder of living. The miracle of it all.
The five-year-old climbed up on my lap and
burrowed his porcupine head into my shoulder. I
could see the firelight reflected in his dreaming
eyes. "Daddy?"
"Yes?" It would be dark, now, in the
old burial ground. Darkness and silence, and the
old owl watching the shifting leaf-patterns, and
wisdom carved on an ancient stone.
"Tell me a story."
"A story?" One generation passeth
away, and another generation cometh. "Well,
once upon a time. . . ."
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Acceptance
of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not
mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary it
means accepting
it as it comes. . . . To accept is to say yes to life in its
entirety.
Paul
Tournier
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What We
Find to Be Important
It's taken me a very, very long time to come to a point
in my life at which I'm able to make choices based on
the things that I think are really important. I'm
not completely there yet--I still make decisions based
on money when I have fears that I may not have enough in
the future, and I still make some decisions based on
what I believe people will think about me after I do a
certain something. But at least when I do these
things now, I'm aware of them, and very often I'm able
to reverse a decision before I actually act. I may
decide to buy something that I know is lower quality
because I want to save a few bucks, and often I'm able
to catch myself before I actually buy the cheaper thing
instead of the thing that's going to last longer and be
more satisfying.
When I think about these tendencies, I have to think for
a moment or three about just what I truly find to be
important, and why. When I'm deciding how to grade
a class for a semester, is it more important to have a
strict grading policy that I'm unwilling to compromise
on, in order to force the students to push themselves
harder to reach certain performance goals, or to have a
flexible policy that allows many students to get high
grades as long as they put forth a lot of effort?
Over the course of years I've come to the conclusion
that being a strict grader always has been a reflection
of my own insecurities as a teacher rather than being a
pedagogical stance or strategy that allows students to
receive decent grades for strong effort rather than
expecting them to memorize certain things that they may
or may not remember six months from now.
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To learn new habits is
everything,
for it is to reach
the substance of
life. Life is but a tissue of habits.
Henri
Frederic
Amiel
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Here
are some things that are truly important to me.
Compassion. I want to try to feel--or at least
understand--what other people feel so that I don't
disregard those feelings. If I feel
compassion, I'm able to show caring and kindness in
situations in which I might otherwise feel
impatience and frustration. If I feel
compassion I'm much less likely to judge others;
rather, I can observe what they're going through and
try to recognize opportunities to help them out when
I can.
Learning. I want to spend my time on this
planet learning as much as I can about as many
things as I can. I'll never learn everything
about everything, of course, but I can learn a lot
about many things. And the more I know the
more I understand about life and living, and with
that knowledge I can help others to understand many
things they might otherwise not get.
Individuality. I don't want to simply follow
the crowd in the things that I do--I want to do
things that I truly care about, that mean a lot to
me as a person. If I simply follow others,
then my true self rarely shines through because I'm
really doing nothing that is unique or
creative. When I follow others, I actually can
hurt myself because I'm not doing anything to reach
my potential in any way, and my potential is one of
the most truly unique aspects of who I am--and
wasted potential will never be recovered.
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As I grow
to understand
life less and less,
I learn to live it
more and more.
Jules Renard
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Helpfulness.
When a chance to help comes up, I don't want to turn
my back and hope that someone doesn't see me.
I want to do the best I can to help other people,
within certain limits, of course. I don't want
to be used because of my willingness to help others,
but I also don't want to become skeptical of every
request for help. Our helpfulness can be
something that makes another person feel more peace
of mind, that gives someone the encouragement they
need to go on, that makes someone feel positive
about the world they're living in.
Acceptance. It's up to me to accept others for
what they are, and not to judge them based on what I
think they should be. I may not always like
what they are, but that doesn't mean that I can't
accept them. When I try to fight the way
things are, or when I allow them to rob me of my
peace of mind, then the problem I face is of my own
making. Sometimes we feel justified in not
accepting things because we like to think that
things shouldn't be that way. The reality is,
though, that the world doesn't work based on our
personal perceptions of how things should be.
And until we accept things as they are, we are
simply unable to move on to other things.
Kindness. This is a concept that isn't valued
nearly enough. Kindness, indeed, should be a
way of life. If we allow it to be so, then
we're going to find that our lives become much more
pleasant and fulfilling. We may not be as
financially "successful" as someone who's
a cutthroat businessperson, and we may encounter
people who try to take advantage of us because of
our kindness, but things like this should reinforce
our decision to be kind rather than make us consider
not being kind any longer, or only being kind to
people we like. Kindness is as a drink of cool
water after hours of being thirsty--it's simple and
it's effective, and it makes the recipient--and the
giver--feel incredibly good and very much loved.
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Life is not always what one wants it
to be,
but to make
the best of it, as
it is, is the only way of
being happy.
Jennie Jerome Churchill
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Moderation.
We live in a society that encourages
over-indulgence, in food and material goods and in
things like vacations. Our advertising is
geared towards making us want more and more, and we
develop a need to "keep up with" our
neighbors by buying more and more things. For
the most part, we've lost the ability to be
moderate--to eat moderately sized servings, to be
happy with a less expensive car, to work less and
spend more time with our families. I know
couples who won't be having children who live in
five-bedroom houses. This lack of moderation
often leads to financial problems as we struggle
with payments on credit cards and vehicles and
mortgages. When we over-indulge, we end up
having to pay for it, one way or another, and the
stress often comes afterwards--and we don't make the
connection between the stress and our own lack of
moderation.
Love. Easily the most important aspect of
life. When we love, we live.
Unfortunately, most of us learn to love with
conditions--that others love us back, that they act
a certain way when we love them, that they thank us
for our love, that they somehow "deserve"
our love. Love by its very definition, though,
is unconditional, and when we learn to love without
condition, we learn to live our lives fully and
completely. What's important to me is that I
show love in all that I do--that I not insult to
make a joke, that I not ask more of people than
they're able to give, that I not judge, that I help
when I can--including helping by not helping,
showing "tough love" sometimes when I
really feel that it's needed the most.
What's most important to you? Are you here to
get what you can no matter what the cost may be, or
to give all that you can? Are you here to
consume or create, to give or to take? The
things that are important to you help to show not
just who you are as a person, but the kind of life
that you're living--be it a self-centered life, or
an others-centered life. The choice is always
up to you, and you're the one who most lives with
the results. Whatever's important to you,
though, make sure that you put it front-and-center
in your life so that you can benefit from it, and so
that others may benefit from it, too.
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When
things are bad, we take
comfort
in the thought that
they could always be worse.
And when they are, we find
hope in
the thought
that things
are so bad they have to get better.
Malcolm
Forbes
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The more I focused on lack and on what I
couldn’t have, the more depressed I became.
The more depressed I became, the more I focused on lack.
My soul whispered that what I really yearned for was not
financial security but financial serenity.
I was still—quiet enough to listen.
At that moment I acknowledged the deep longing in my
heart. What I
hungered for was an inner peace that the world could not take
away. I asked for
help and committed to following wheresoever Spirit would lead
me. For the first
time in my life I discarded my five-year goals and became a
seeker, a pilgrim, a sojourner.
When
I surrendered my desire for security and sought serenity
instead, I looked at my life with open eyes.
I saw that I had much for which to be grateful.
I felt humbled by my riches and regretted that I took for
granted the abundance that already existed in my life.
How could I expect more from the universe when I didn’t
appreciate what I already had?
Sarah Ban Breathnach
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We can be thankful to a friend for a
few acres or a little money;
and yet for the freedom and
command of the whole earth,
and for the great benefits of
our being, our life, health,
and reason, we look upon
ourselves as under no obligation.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
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