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30 August 2022
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Hello,
and welcome! Our world is continuing to move
through space
at incredible speeds, and time continues to go by as
we age and learn
and grow and continue to develop. We hope that
the end of this month
finds you in a very good place, ready and willing to
learn from all that
has happened so far in the month and all that will
happen in the two
days of August that are left to us. Take care
and enjoy!
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Death
and Life
Dean Orish |
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Personality
Zig Ziglar |
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Common
Moments
tom walsh |
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Simple and Profound
Thoughts
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Children
have never been very good at listening to their elders, but
they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
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Discipline
is necessary to curb the mind,
otherwise there is no peace.
Jiddu
Krishnamurti
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Develop
success from failures. Discouragement and failure
are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
Dale
Carnegie
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It would do the world good if
every person in it would compel themselves
occasionally to be absolutely alone. Most of
the world's progress has come
out of such
loneliness.
Bruce Barton |
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Death
and Life
Dean Ornish
(This passage comes from the forward to
the book Enjoy Every Sandwich.)
Imagine the unthinkable: You’re a well-known, prominent
physician, you have a loving wife and two beautiful kids,
and you’ve made a meaningful difference in the lives of
many thousands of people. Your only major unfulfilled
desire is to be a rock star, and you’re working on that
one, too.
In a heartbeat, your life is turned upside down:
your doctor just told you that you have metastatic cancer
and you probably have less than a year to live.
We all know we’re going to die one day; the mortality
rate is still 100 percent, one per person. But it’s not
something we think about very often unless we’ve had a
brush with a life-threatening illness or know someone who
has. Even then, though, the awareness of our mortality is
hard to hold on to.
For example, people who have recently had a heart attack
will do just about anything that their doctor or nurse
recommends—change their diet, exercise, quit smoking,
etc.—for about six weeks or so, and then they tend to go
back to their old habits and patterns of living.
Because it’s just too terrifying for most people to come
to terms with their mortality.
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And yet, a
fundamental part of many spiritual traditions is a
wonderful paradox: to the degree we can embrace our
mortality rather than deny it, we can live that much more
completely and joyfully. When something profoundly
shakes your worldview—like finding out that you have
cancer and only a year to live—it radically alters the
preconceptions and paradigms of your life.
In this extraordinary book, Dr. Lee Lipsenthal shares his
transformative journey with us. Deeply personal yet
universal in scope, he eloquently describes how accepting
death is intensely clarifying, helping us to understand,
to really know in every cell, every fiber of our being,
what matters and what does not; how we want to spend our
precious time, doing what, and with whom. It’s not
just about how to die peacefully and gracefully; more
important, he describes how to live fully.
As he writes, “Being fully alive, I discovered, has
nothing to do with the presence or absence of
disease.” He describes how compassion and
forgiveness don’t excuse or condone what another person
may have done to hurt us, but it frees us from
suffering—right here, right now. And when we can
apply that same compassion to ourselves—shining a light
in the darkness, letting go of anger and judgment—then
it frees us and everyone else around us. When a
person may have only a year to live, why waste any time
holding on to hurts and grievances? And then we
realize, “Why should we, either?”
As Quincy Jones said after surviving a ruptured aneurysm
that caused bleeding into his brain many years ago,
“Live each day like it’s your last, and one day
you’ll be right.”
The awareness of death grounds us. It helps us to
fend off the advertisements and magazines and well-meaning
friends and family who say that having more and doing more
is what brings lasting happiness, when we know better.
Preconceptions limit perceptions. Seeing is
believing, but we often see only what we believe.
Studies show that we are continually filtering our
perceptions of how we believe the world is. While
this helps to provide a sense of order, it also limits our
experiences. Preconceptions can lead to boredom
because they limit our experiences so significantly.
Great artists and scientists are able to see the world
without filtering it through the veil of their
preconceptions and paradigms. They literally see and
experience the world in a new way, and then they can share
their vision with others, helping to transform the world
we experience. This is what Lee does here.
Confronting and accepting death can shatter our
preconceptions and shake our beliefs to the core.
This can frighten and overwhelm us, or open doors to new,
more beautiful ways of living and being that allow us to
experience our world anew. Sometimes both. It
can even open us to remarkable experiences that don’t
fit within the conventional scientific worldview, as Lee
courageously shares.
I had a near-death experience when I was in college, and
it changed my life. I had become profoundly
depressed to the point of being actively suicidal.
However, once you really come to terms with your own
mortality, it’s easy to descend into nihilism: why
bother, nothing matters, big deal, who cares, etc.
That’s what happened to me, and it’s one of the
reasons that we don’t think about our own mortality very
often.
When I ultimately decided to stay alive, I made a
conscious choice to live as fully as possible. Having come
about as close as possible to killing myself without
actually doing it—staring into the abyss—was
liberating.
I decided not to rely on the advice of others on how to
live my life, for doing so had almost killed me. So, it
became important for me to find out for myself, which
meant I was going to lead a messy life. I didn’t
want to borrow wisdom; I wanted to know from my own
experiences. I would try a lot of different things,
make a lot of mistakes and learn from them. Then,
I’d know what was true and what was not. Whatever wisdom
I developed would be experienced, not borrowed. As
Joseph Campbell once wrote, “I don’t have faith, I
have experience.”
What helped me survive was realizing that an antidote to
nihilism is to create meaning in all aspects of our
lives. Making every act sacred is what enables us to
more fully enjoy life, or as Lee writes, “to enjoy every
sandwich.”
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Personality
Zig Ziglar
My dictionary tells me that personality is the
"personal or individual quality that makes one
person be different and act differently from
another." Personality is "the
total physical, intellectual, and emotional structure
of an individual, including abilities, interests, and
attitudes." Personality is the sum total of
all of our qualities. With this in mind, let's
explore the benefits and ramifications of a pleasing
personality.
Today at lunch in a family restaurant, one of the
hostesses came by and, with a pleasant smile, asked us
about our meal. We commented that it was
delicious, and she said, "I'm really
pleased. We're glad you folks are here with
us." After she left, I commented to my wife
that she was certainly a pleasant, personable young
woman, and my wife wholeheartedly agreed.
Too many people have forgotten that we can choose to
smile and be pleasant or to frown and be rude and
thoughtless. Too many people make the wrong
choice, and their personalities make them come across
as people we don't want as friends or coworkers.
There is only one opportunity to make a first
impression, and all of us instinctively make decisions
or judgments about an individual within the first few
seconds of crossing paths. With that in mind, I
believe that when we teach our kids to smile, to be
pleasant and cheerful, to be courteous and respectful
of others, to pleasantly respond to requests or
questions, we are helping them to develop a
personality that will open many doors for them.
Once the doors are opened, only character will keep
them open, so it's even more important to give the
personality a foundation with character.
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Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week. |
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The
principles we live by, in business and in social life,
are the most important part of happiness.
Harry Harrison
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Common
Moments
Not every moment is meant to be special in a way
that you'll remember it forever. Not every
moment becomes a memory that will stay with us, one
that we can refer back to by day and time:
"Do you remember that morning in December five
years ago?" Most of our moments consist
simply of us living our lives, doing our things,
trying to get by in the best ways we know how.
And that's a good thing, of course. If we
constantly lived a life of highs, of spectacular
moments, we certainly wouldn't get much of the rest
that we need. We definitely wouldn't learn
some of the most important lessons in life, those
lessons that come as we experience something for the
twentieth time and finally see beyond the surface of
the moment to catch a glimpse of something deeper
that we had no idea was there.
These are moments that are just as important to me
as the "high" moments, the memorable
events that stick with us. Here are some of my
favorite "common" moments, things that
happen over and over again, and which I try to
appreciate each time I experience them.
Lying down for a nap when I need one is one of my
favorite types of moments. Simply having the
luxury of being able to lie down for a nap is an
incredible blessing, one that I appreciate a
lot. But when I'm tired or groggy and I need
to rest, having the ability to lie down and sleep is
one of my favorite things in the world. Being
able to drift off to sleep in the middle of the day
is a great thing, and I do my best to make sure that
I make the most of these moments because they are
very special indeed.
Having a conversation with a very young child is
always great. This happened to me just a few
days ago, when I was able to spend about half and
hour talking with Olivia, who's four. She had
a lot to say and a lot to ask; she helped me to
understand how she sees the world, and she made me
clarify many things that I think and believe.
"Why?" is a four-year-old's favorite
question, and she used it liberally. She also
explained to me what dog heaven is like and why
there are no dog houses in dog heaven. I love
hearing what very young people are thinking.
When a student gets something for the first time,
it's a great feeling. After all, since I'm a
teacher that's one of my main goals in life--for
students to understand something that they didn't
understand before or do something they hadn't been
able to do before. Most of the time the
students move along with me, learning through
process, mostly, and that's fine. Most of
their learning doesn't come in moments, but over
days and weeks and months. But sometimes there
are those moments of comprehension when something
just clicks, and all of a sudden many other things
seem clearer, too, because of that moment of
comprehension.
Eating food that I really like, such as chocolate,
can make for a wonderful moment--as long as I make
the effort to be mindful of the moment and to
appreciate it fully. Eating is something that
we tend to take for granted, but sometimes something
that's really good can help us to appreciate the
experience more and make the most of it.
I love it when I'm able to look into the eyes of
another person and actually see the eyes. Our
eyes are amazing things, yet we don't often look
closely at those of someone else. Sharing that
kind of look, though, makes for a truly special
moment, one that can be life-changing, one that can
completely change our perspective on the other
person and what we think about that person.
When I'm listening to music and a really good song
gets to a really good part, that makes for an
extremely special moment, too. One of the
beauties of this type of moment is realizing that it
took the rest of the song--the unspectacular
moments--to lead up to this part of the song.
And isn't that just how life is? We spend our
time doing unspectacular things only to lead up to
spectacular moments. We parent a child through
many unrewarding days and suddenly the child does
something amazing. We do our jobs consistently
without reward when suddenly someone compliments us
or thanks us for the wonderful job that we do.
Most people know the end of Beethoven's Ninth all by
itself, but it means much, much more when it comes
at the end of the entire symphony.
In our society we tend to want to try to have moment
after moment of highs, of amazing things, yet life
doesn't work that way. I could go on and on
with more "common" moments that are truly
amazing to me, but the point is already made, isn't
it? I know that in the future, some of my best
moments of all will be coffee with a friend, a
conversation with a very young person, a class that
goes very well, an hour sitting on a park bench
relaxing. If I wait for the highs, for the
exceptional moments, I'm setting myself up for a
lifetime of disappointments. But if I accept
the common moments for the miracles that they are
and the wonders that they bring, then I'm forging a
life that I can live without regrets, and when I
look back my life will be literally full of really
nice moments, not just a couple of spikes on a graph
that happened years apart from each other.
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The
value of compassion cannot be over-emphasized. Anyone
can criticize. It takes a true believer to be
compassionate. No greater burden can be borne
by an individual than
to know no one cares or understands.
Arthur H.
Stainback
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Because it is
possible to create--creating one’s self, willing to
be one’s self, as well as creating in all the
innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases
of the same process)--one has anxiety. One would
have no anxiety if there were no possibility
whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s
possibilities, always involves negative as well as
positive aspects. It always involves destroying
the status quo, destroying old patterns within
oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung
to from childhood on, and creating new and original
forms and ways of living. If one does not do
this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail
oneself of one's possibilities; one is shirking his or
her responsibility to him- or herself. Hence
refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings
guilt toward one’s self.
But creating also
means destroying the status quo of one’s
environment, breaking the old forms; it means
producing something new and original in human
relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the
creativity of the artist). Thus every experience
of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or
denial toward other persons in one’s environment or
established patterns within one’s self. To put
the matter figuratively, in every experience of
creativity something in the past is killed that
something new in the present may be born. Hence,
for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant
of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and
actualizing possibility. The more creative the
person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are
potentially present.
Rollo May
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Slow
down and take the time to really see. Take a moment to see
what is going on around you right now, right where you
are.
You may be missing something wonderful.
J.
Michael Thomas
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