Today's
Meditation:
Who
am I? Can people tell who I am and what I believe
simply by observing me? Do my ideals and values
shine through in my actions? Am I behaving in a way
that's consistent with what's truly important to me in
life?
It's
easy enough to hold our beliefs about what's important
without actually acting in ways that are consistent with
those beliefs. It's even easy for us to expect
others to live up to our expectations and values without
living up to them ourselves. But when we do that, we
certainly aren't contributing a valuable and consistent
role model to our society. We aren't going to give
to the world a model of what we find to be most important
in our dealings with the world.
Whether
we want to believe it or not, there are many people
looking to us for modeling, looking to us to see how they
should act in society. And if they see us not
telling the truth, they'll find it much easier not to tell
the truth themselves. If they hear us talk about the
importance of helping others but never witness us helping
anyone else, then what is the true message that we're
sending to them?
The
beauty of making our actions match our beliefs is that
when enough of us start doing so, then our societies as a
whole will begin to resemble those actions. When
more people start behaving decently and humanely, then the
societies in which we live will become more decent and
more humane. We do have the ability to affect the
world, little by little, but our contribution will be null
and void if we act in ways that are inconsistent with our
beliefs.
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