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27 June 2023
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The
good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents
and
discerns those inner qualities
that make all people
human
and,
therefore, brothers and sisters.
Martin
Luther King, Jr.
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When you discover that you are
riding
a dead
horse, the best
strategy
is to dismount.
Dakota tribal saying
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Compassion
is not religious business, it is human business; it is not luxury, it is
essential for our own peace and mental stability; it is essential for
human survival.
the
Dalai Lama
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Holy
Indifference
Joan
Chittister
If there is anything that strikes terror into the soul of
the sincere it is fear of failure. To be a success
in something marks the measure of our worth. It
gives us honor on the street corners of our worlds.
It gives us stature among our peers. It gives us a
sense of invincibility. But one of the central
questions of life may well be how to tell success from
failure. It's not so simple a task as we are
inclined to think, perhaps, at the first toss of the
question. Failure, we know, is unacceptable.
We do a great deal to avoid it. We do even more to
hide it. But the real truth is that there is a great
deal of failure in success: Winning pitchers lose a
good many baseball games. Wealthy people risk a
great deal of money to make money. Scientists can
spend their entire lives mixing the wrong compounds,
writing the wrong formulas, testing the wrong hypotheses.
The problem is that there are two faces of failure, one of
them life-giving, the other one deadly. I have seen
them both.
The first face of failure I saw in the life of an
internationally recognized writer who, first intent on
being an English professor, studied at Oxford but
failed. I gasped at the very thought of it.
But she spoke about the loss of those years and that
degree with a laugh and a toss of her head:
"Luckiest thing that ever happened to me," she
said.
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"Otherwise
I'd be in a small college somewhere teaching
writing. As it is, I'm doing just what I'm supposed
to be doing." I thought about the remark for
days. Here was a woman who knew the place of failure
in our eternal quest to be ourselves.
The second face of failure I saw in a woman with great
musical talent who, discouraged by the difficulty of her
early studies, dropped out of music school and never
studied another thing in her life. She died
disgruntled, underdeveloped, and trapped within the
boundaries of the self.
Clearly, failure may, in the long run, be the only real
key to success. The first step to becoming what we
most seek may well be indifference to dashed hope and
perpetual disappointment and the depression that comes
with reaching for guinea gold and grasping only dust.
But if that is the case, then we must develop the capacity
for failure in a society that glorifies success but gives
short shrift to the forging of it. We must learn to
recognize, to value, to prize all the endless attempts it
takes to do what we want to do but which for us is still
undoable.
We need to cultivate a sense of holy indifference.
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Always
Make Your Confidence Greater Than Your Comfort
an excerpt
Dan Sullivan & Catherine Nomura
Increased confidence is crucial for lifetime
growth. Many successful people start off
life as dreamers and risk takers, but the moment
they become successful, they begin to seek
greater security and comfort over everything
else. This attitude puts them to sleep
motivationally, and they lose the confidence
that made them so successful. Security and
comfort are desirable by-products of goal
achievement, but when they become the goal
itself, they quickly stop lifetime growth.
Treat any increase in comfort in your life as
only a temporary stage for establishing bigger
goals. Continually strive for higher goals
and achievement, and your confidence will always
be greater than your comfort.
All growth requires that we stretch beyond where
we've been before. As we do this, our
confidence about being able to take on new
challenges increases. Confidence gives us
the ability to overcome fear and stay in motion,
continually realizing our bigger future.
Short Breaks Build Confidence
Growing confidence also requires that we
periodically take "comfort
breaks." These are periods of rest,
which are necessary so that we can acknowledge
and celebrate our achievements and rejuvenate
for the next challenge--key preparation for
approaching a new task with confidence. We
need to take the time to say to ourselves,
"I've done this and proved I can do
it. Now what else does this make
possible?"
Continued growth requires a balance between
stretching ourselves beyond where we're
comfortable, to increase our confidence to new
levels, and taking comfort breaks at those new
levels so that they can begin to feel normal.
It's a lot like exercising our muscles: If
we constantly push our limits without taking any
breaks, we run the strong risk of burnout,
injury, or at least hitting a point of
diminishing returns, where more effort returns
less and less progress. But if we stop for
too long, we lose strength and momentum and even
lose the progress we've gained. The trick
is to keep comfort breaks short enough that we
don't lose our momentum; otherwise, confidence
can begin to slip away, and it can be hard to
get going again. We can become trapped in
comfort, at which point it becomes a growth
stopper.
The biggest challenge to leaving our comfort
zone is always fear: fear that we'll fail,
fear that someone will discover that we're not
as good as they thought we were, fear that we'll
lose something important, fear that people won't
understand what we're doing--the list goes on
and on. Confidence is the ability to
transform these fears into focused thinking and
action.
Even highly successful people experience fear,
though eventually they learn not to be stopped
by it. For some, it just means that the
challenge is big enough and meaningful enough to
be worthwhile. . . .
So how do you know if you're in a comfort
trap? Usually, if you're really honest
with yourself, you can feel when your growth is
slowing down and it's time to take on something
new. Life starts to feel a bit too easy or
routine, or it begins to lose the sense of
meaning and excitement it once had. You
may start feeling bored or restless, or find
yourself asking, "Is this all there
is?" Even with these nagging
feelings, sometimes we can be very good at
convincing ourselves that where we are is OK,
especially if it's comfortable and the
alternatives for growth are less
comfortable. There are lots of
justifications and distractions we can use to
reinforce our decision to stay put. When
we do this, we end up selling our our dreams in
exchange for comfort. . . .
Those who are used to making their confidence
greater than their comfort will tell you that
after a while, you become less fearful of making
mistakes. In fact, you begin to realize
that the biggest breakthroughs often come from
making mistakes, because that's where you get
your best improvement ideas. No matter how
things work out, you'll always grow more and
reap rewards from leaving comfort behind and
doing things that force you to develop new
capabilities and confidence. You just have
to be comfortable with not knowing in advance
what those rewards are going to be. Where
lifetime growth is concerned, always making your
confidence greater than your comfort is a
no-lose proposition.
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Fighting
life only saps our energy, blocking us from the love,
healing, and compassion available to us from our own hearts.
Once we accept our given reality, our energy shifts. Release
happens.
Susan
Santucci
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Beauty
This world is
full of beauty. It's full of things and places and people
and animals who share their beauty with us each day--but
unfortunately, we've been conditioned over the course of our lives
not to see that beauty any longer, if we ever noticed it in the
first place. And therein lies the problem with beauty:
it has tremendous potential to make our lives richer, yet it can
only do when and if we notice it and appreciate it. So the
problem with beauty lies not in the beautiful object or person,
but in ourselves and our lack of awareness and gratitude.
Beauty is, they say, in the eye of the beholder. But this
isn't necessarily true. While there are some works of art or
industry, for example, that one person may find beautiful and
another may find horribly ugly, the fact that I don't see
something as physically attractive does not mean that it is devoid
of beauty. This is especially true in people--our society
teaches us that certain types of looks are more beautiful than
others, so it's very easy to miss the beauty in a person whose
looks don't match the societal "ideal." And this
is a huge shame because if we're unable to see the beauty in other
people who are, indeed, beautiful, then our lives are much, much
poorer.
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The fact that we can't see the beauty in
something doesn't suggest
that it's not there. Rather, it suggests that we are
not looking carefully
enough or with a broad enough perspective to see it.
Richard
Carlson
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Seeing beauty
isn't necessarily all that easy, though. I've
known many people who do their best to hide their
beauty, often simply because they don't think
they're beautiful at all. They hide their
talents and abilities, and they show the world their
hardness or their anger, and that's a facade that is
very often difficult to see through. Some
young girls who have been made to feel ugly learn to
dress and act in unattractive ways; some young boys
who don't feel at all beautiful do their best to
make themselves ugly, either through their actions
or their clothing or their hygiene.
But beauty is an important part of our world, and
thus an important part of our lives. And
beauty is something that we all share, both in its
possession and in the enjoyment we get from
it. If I'm able to see your beauty clearly--in
your eyes or your smile or your words or your
actions, then my life is richer. If you're
able to see mine, your life is richer. If I
hide my beauty, though, I won't be making your life
even the slightest bit more positive.
Most of us need to make an effort to be able to see
beauty more easily. It makes me feel awful to
think of how often I've taken people for granted as
just "ordinary" people with no real
beauty, only to see later that their beauty was
amazing--it was just somewhere that I hadn't even
thought of looking. My own judgmental attitude
and inability to recognize something that was right
in front of my eyes kept me from experiencing some
amazing things. It's taken me a long time to
learn to actively seek a person's beauty, or a
town's beauty, or a work of art's beauty, but
nowadays I think that if I don't see the beauty
immediately, that's a sign that the beauty is
probably going to be more extraordinary than
superficial beauty usually is.
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People
should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine
picture every day of their lives, in order that worldly cares may not
obliterate
the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
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Far too often,
we consider superficial beauty to be the true
indicator of beauty, and that's far from the
case. Yes, the spectacular sunset is
beautiful, but the less dramatic sunsets have their
own subtle beauty, too. Some trees don't seem
to be nearly as beautiful as others, yet what they
contribute to the planet is necessary and,
therefore, beautiful. Sometimes we need to
look very closely at things to see the beauty of
their intricacy, while other times we may be looking
too close and we should back up a bit to see the
beauty in the bigger picture.
The appreciation of beauty is a gift that we should
not squander. But it's also a gift that we
should not allow to be affected by the superficial
mores of our culture--we should not let other people
define beauty for us. If we do so, we're
making our lives poorer, for then we will lost out
on much beauty that remains unrecognized and
unappreciated. When we're able to recognize
beauty, we then allow wonder and awe to be an
important part of our lives, and these two
attributes also contribute much to a healthy and
fulfilling life.
If we actively make an effort to allow beauty to be
an important part of our lives, then we can enrich
our lives ourselves. And if we make sure that
we define beauty ourselves, based on our instincts
and our personal tastes, we won't spend a lot of
time wondering why we don't feel the same way about
a particular object or person that other people
feel. As Jean says below, the appreciation of
beauty opens doors to our souls, and those are doors
that always should be open.
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As I
experience it, appreciation of beauty is access to the
soul. With beauty
in our lives, we walk and carry
ourselves more lightly
and with a different look
in our
eyes. To look into the eyes
of someone beholding
beauty is to look
through the windows
of the soul. Anytime
we catch a glimpse of soul, beauty
is there;
anytime we
catch our breath and feel "How beautiful!,"
the
soul is present.
Jean
Shinoda
Bolen
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I've reached a
point at which I can see beauty in almost
everything, even litter on the highway (in its
texture or shape or form) or other things that don't
seem to have any inherent beauty. (Of course,
I pick up all the litter I can, because even if it
does have some beauty, the natural state of a place
is usually better.) In being able to recognize
and appreciate the beauty in the world in which I
live, I've given myself a tool that can help me to
feel better when I feel down, that can help to elate
me when I need to feel elation, that can brighten a
dull day or make even brighter a day already
bright. Seeing and appreciating beauty is a
gift that I can give to myself whenever I feel the
need. And when I do this, my life is brighter
and my spirit soars, knowing that I'm not neglecting
it at all.
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More
on beauty.
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Adversity draws
people together and produces beauty and harmony
in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces
ice-flowers
on the window panes, which vanish with the warmth.
Søren Kierkegaard
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We
have lived by the assumption that what was good for us
would be good for the world. And this has been based
on the even flimsier assumption that we could know
with any certainty what was good even for us. We have
fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal
pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward
the world--to the incalculable disadvantage of the
world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps
very close to too late, our great error has become
clear. It is not only our own creativity--our own
capacity for life--that is stifled by our arrogant
assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that
it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption
that what is good for the world will be good for us.
And that requires that we make the effort to know the
world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn
to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its
limits. But even more important, we must learn to
acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we
will never entirely understand it. We must abandon
arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense
of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be
worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it
is only on the condition of humility and reverence
before the world that our species will be able to
remain in it.
Wendell Berry
The Art of the Commonplace
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Sometimes
during the day, I consciously focus on some ordinary object and
allow myself a momentary "paying-attention." This
paying-attention gives meaning
to my life. I don't know who it was, but someone said that
careful attention
paid to anything is a window into the universe. Pausing to think
this way,
even for a brief moment, is very important. It gives quality to
my day.
Robert Fulghum
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