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8 January 2024
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How beautiful a day can be when kindness touches it!
George Elliston
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How many cares one loses when one decides not to be
something, but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
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Respect is appreciation of the separateness of the other
person, of the ways in which he or she is unique.
Annie Gottlieb
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Life
becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also
becomes richer and happier.
Albert Schweitzer
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Riches
and Happiness
Orison
Swett Marden
Every mind seems capable of entertaining a certain quantity of Happiness, which no institutions can increase, no circumstances alter, and entirely independent of Fortune. Let anyone compare his
or her present fortune with the past, and they will probably find
themselves, upon the whole, neither better nor worse than formerly.—Goldsmith.
The youth should be so trained in the science of happiness as to be able to say to a
person who has millions of dollars but very little else —"I have set my face towards making a success of life, not merely a success of dollars. If any one can get more out of life than I can,
that person is welcome to it."
What a misfortune to the world, if wealth could produce the happiness which most people think it can! If wealth were essential, if a
person had to be rich to be happy, the wealthy would always be happy and the poor unhappy.
But riches alone do not make people happy or blessed. Money, to make a person happy, must serve
one's higher nature, the development of the good in
oneself or in others, and not pander to anything which tends to bring out the mere animal in
one.
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Wealth in the hands of ignoramuses, in the hands of people with coarse tastes and low ideals, does not contribute to real happiness. The brute qualities lead away from happiness. No one can be really happy who does not have a high ideal and a grand life purpose.
Most people are deluded with the idea that happiness consists in gratifying desires.
They do not realize that "desire is as insatiable as the ocean, and clamors louder and louder as its demands are attended to."
"There is no satiety in riches," said a Roman philosopher.
Gratification, satisfaction of our selfish cravings, only increases our real soul-hunger.
Principle alone can give permanent happiness; material things are ever changing, ever elusive; there is no permanency, no endurance in them.
One of the greatest disappointments of many rich people is that they have not been able to purchase happiness with money. The powerlessness of money to purchase happiness has
disappointed more human beings than almost anything else.
People who seek happiness in money are in the position of a man seeking safety on a floating piece of ice, which is drifting with certainty toward the open sea. What money can buy only satisfies a small part of an immortal being.
We cannot feed upon bread alone. We all know people who have never amassed riches but who have built up a magnificent bulwark of character, a superb personality; who have never won millions but have become millionaires of character, have accumulated untold riches in priceless friendships, and have been enshrined in a multitude of loving hearts.
They are not rich in money but rich in the things that are worth while, in things which money will not buy.
They have enriched hundreds of other lives by their encouragement, inspiration, their uplifting and ennobling influence.
To be rich in money and poverty-stricken in everything else is to be poor indeed.
from The Joys of Living (1913)
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What Are You Working
For?
an excerpt
Deborah K. Heisz
The commercial janitorial industry has a notoriously high turnover rate, and in the mid-1990s Jancoa and its competitors faced a common problem: keeping workers. Frustrated, Mary and her husband, Tony, looked for ways to keep workers happier in hopes of slashing their high turnover rate.
“We realized people’s purpose isn’t just about the task they’re doing. It’s about what they’re working for,” Mary says. “What will they do with the money they earn? Is it to give their family a better life? Travel? Spend more time together? When people dream about what they
will do in the future, it changes what they do today.”
Based on that realization, Mary and Tony developed an innovative program to help employees identify their goals and dreams and then create a plan of action to achieve them. While employees helped Jancoa succeed, Mary and Tony worked on finding ways to make their employees’ dreams come true.
That initial idea blossomed into a full-blown process now known as the Dream Manager program. Using one-on-one coaching sessions, the program helps employees identify their personal goals—whether that means running a marathon, getting a college degree, buying a home, or even starting their own business. The coaching program includes helping workers create an action plan by identifying measurable goals and implementing ways to reach them.
The Millers’ unusual but successful approach caught the attention of author Michael Kelly and became the focus of his New York Times bestselling book The Dream Manager. That exposure helped introduce the concept on a wide scale, and today Dream Manager programs have been implemented by companies around the globe.
As Mary and Tony’s business has grown, so has their staff of janitorial workers. Today, the company employs more than four hundred people, including a full-time dream manager, who helps keep track of the goals and action plans. The dream manager meets with employees on their first day of work, helps them identify their goals and dreams, and then creates action steps so the employees can achieve them.
Jancoa’s employee turnover rate is now more than 300 percent better than the industry average, and the company hasn’t had to run a help-wanted ad in years. Even better? Business is booming, thanks to their dedicated and hardworking employees. The job hasn’t changed, but the attitude with which their employees approach their work has.
Mary explains that a person’s attitude makes all the difference in life, regardless of the job.
“Every job is so much bigger than the task you do; remembering that, every day, changes the way you approach it,” she says. Focusing on the bigger picture, both with regard to the job and the dreams it helps fund, also makes it easier to let go of the daily drama in the workplace—something that makes any workplace more enjoyable. A positive attitude, she says, adds value to life. “You can choose to make each day fun and meaningful. You may not be able to control what is going on around you, but you can choose to enjoy what you’re doing and remember why you’re doing it.”
from Live Happy: Ten Practices for Choosing Joy
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Walking
is the great adventure, the first meditation,
a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind.
Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
Gary Snyder
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Limitations,
or Possibilities?
Perspective is one of
the most important aspects of our lives. How do we
see things? How we see them does more to determine
the effect they have on us than what they really are
sometimes. And how we look at the world can go a
long way towards causing us to be happy or frustrated,
content or discontent, optimistic or pessimistic.
The world is what it is, and most of the time we can do
nothing to change how it's going--but we can change how
we look at it. And most of us are able and willing
to make those changes, but what would our lives be like
if we can always see the inherent positive even in
situations that seem to be incredibly negative?
It took me a long time to realize just how much of my
own attitude towards life depended on me, myself.
I always thought that somehow life was being unfair, as
if it had something against me personally. I
always saw setbacks as terrible things, not ways in
which I might be being redirected. If I applied
for a job and didn't get it, it upset me very
much--whereas today, I would look at the situation as
life telling me there's something else out there that's
better. If I liked a woman and no relationship
developed, I rarely saw that perhaps it was better that
way because we might not have been as compatible as I
had thought.
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Jumping at
several small opportunities may get us there
more quickly
than waiting for one big one to come along.
Hugh Allen
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I deal with many
students of all ages who talk about little but the
limitations they see in life. They don't have
the abilities, the looks, the money, the right
ethnicity, the brains to do the things they want--or
so they say. Unfortunately, many of them are
looking at not just the big picture, but the huge
picture: I can't be a doctor because I don't
have $100,000 for college. What they don't
look at is that they can start classes at a
community college to make a start on a medical
degree, or they can even start at a university
part-time. Sometimes, our possibilities can
give us a start towards our major goals--and I've
seen almost no situations in which a long-term
possibility can't be worked towards with small
steps. (They do exist, of course, but there
are very few of them!)
And if someone starts on their path towards being a
doctor by taking courses at a community college,
that's definitely taking advantage of a possibility
and not simply a limitation. The situation can
be expressed as "I don't have enough money to
go to the university full time," or it can be
explained as "I have an opportunity to take
care of many of my basic courses here while I put
money aside for the university." It's all
in the ways that we look at things, as well as the
ways that we take them.
Many of our perceived limitations come about because
we get far too focused on time for our own
good. If something doesn't happen immediately,
it seems, we feel that it's not happening fast
enough, that we're wasting time because of
limitations. But the truth is that sometimes,
the time that we spend doing other things is just as
valuable to us as the time we would spend doing what
we had planned to do. When I got laid off from
the high school I taught at, it took me more than
four months to find my next job, and I didn't get
hired by quite a number of schools where I had
applied. But I ended up getting a teaching job
in a fascinating place where I learned a great deal
that I never would have learned otherwise from
people I never would have met if I had been offered
one of the other jobs. My limitation (no work)
actually turned out to be an opportunity (new and
different place)--I just needed to be patient and
look at the situation in positive ways.
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The
pessimist sees the
difficulty in every opportunity;
the
optimist, the opportunity
in every difficulty.
L.P.
Jacks
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That's not to say that
every lay-off is fair or good. It's not to say
that if something terrible happens, we should smile
and say, "Oh, good!" But when we
accept any situation for what it is, even the bad
situations come with their silver linings, so to
speak. Once we accept it, we can look for the
opportunities inherent in the new situation.
Did someone break up with me? Then I now have
the opportunity to meet new people and do lots of
things on my own, without checking with someone else
first, and that may be interesting to me but not to
my now-ex. Does my family have very little
money? It may not be fair that I have to get a
job while my friends are playing sports in high
school, but I'm learning skills early that will help
me a great deal in life, and I'm learning how to
handle my own money.
Once my wife and I were hiking on a small mountain
in New Hampshire. We passed an interesting
group of people who were also hiking--and half of
them were blind. The group was training to go
to Mt. Kilimanjaro to hike to the top (you
can read about one such group here). Most
people would consider blindness to be a severe
limitation that would preclude them from attempting
such a feat, but they knew that they had an amazing
opportunity, and they took advantage of it.
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Inside
yourself or outside, you never have to
change what you see,
only the way you see it.
Thaddeus Golas
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We have to be willing
to bend with situations if we're to deal with our
limitations. We can't always conquer
limitations--sometimes they just cause us to walk a
different road that can also be full of
wonder. My fear of heights kept me off a lot
of trails when I lived at the Grand Canyon, but the
other trails that I took instead were amazing
themselves. My lack of ability in advanced
mathematics kept from doing quantitative research
when I was working on my doctorate, but the
qualitative research that I did instead was
tremendously rewarding.
The next time that you start thinking about
limitations that are keeping you from doing what you
want to do, perhaps it would be a good idea to
consider just what possibilities are being opened up
to you to do what you should be doing. The
ways that we look at situations do a great deal to
determine how we respond to them, especially
emotionally. I hope to keep my perspective
healthy and keep in mind that usually when a door
closes, another door or even a window opens
instead. I can stand there and complain about
the closed door, or I can go find out what the open
door has to offer.
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Our rushing and our busyness create a fog
layer that
encloses us,
surrounding us with thicker and
thicker
layers externally and building
denser and denser
fog
layers within. Pretty soon, we have lost
touch
with
that which guides our lives. We need contact
with
our spirituality to be the people we would like to
be.
Anne Wilson Schaef
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The
future requires openness to all spiritual
knowledge. You may prefer one religion, but
there are many paths to the center and we need all
the help we can get.
People who believe there is only one path limit
themselves. They find safety in spiritual
rigidity. They memorize phrases and
mindlessly repeat them, confusing faith with
obedience. They threaten damnation, they
hurl insults in the name of God. They cannot
feel the love of the prophets they quote.
They preach limits in the realm of the unlimited.
The message of the spirit throughout the world is
the same. It is a message of love,
tolerance, compassion, respect, optimism, and a
profound understanding of the meaning of
community.
Jennifer
James
Success Is the Quality of Your Journey
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Our language has
wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created
the word
"loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it
has created
the word "solitude" to express the glory of being
alone.
Paul Tillich
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