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Acceptance
is not submission; it is acknowledgement
of the facts
of a situation, then deciding
what you're going to do about it. -Kathleen
Casey Theisen
If
you limit your actions in life to things
that nobody can possibly find fault
with, you will not do much. -Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Challenges
make you discover things about yourself that you never
really knew. They're what makes the instrument
stretch--what makes you go beyond the norm.
-Cicely Tyson
In
every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent
advantage. In every defeat is a lesson showing you how to win
the victory next time. -Robert Collier
My backyard on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in
Northern California is actually a very small
meadow. In the summer and fall of every
year a stag visits at dawn and at
twilight. This is quite a thing for
someone who grew up in Manhattan. This
year he has six points on his antlers.
Last year five or perhaps four. He is
heart-stopping.
Actually, I did not plan to have a stag, I
planned to have a rose garden. The year
after I moved here, I planted fifteen
rose-bushes, gifts from my friends. It was
a lot of hard work, but I could see it in my
mind's eye. Just like in Sunset
magazine. The roses bloomed in the late
spring and and for a month the garden was
glorious. Then the roses started
disappearing. Puzzled, I eventually
realized that something larger than aphids was
eating them and became determined to catch it in
the act. Getting up one dawn and glancing
out the window, I was transfixed by seeing the
stag for the first time. He looked like an
illustration from one of my childhood
books. As I watched in awe he unhurriedly
crossed the yard, browsed for a while among the
roses, and then delicately ate one of my Queen
Elizabeths.
Every year since then I have had to make a
difficult choice. Am I going to put up
higher fences and have roses, or am I going to
have a stag ten feet from my back door?
Every year
so far, I have chosen the stag. After two years of
watching each other through a pane of glass, I can now sit
outside as he dines.
If I tell people this, some say in disbelief, "You
mean that you are letting this deer eat your
roses?" Sometimes I will invite someone like
this over to watch. One friend, stunned into silence
by the sight, said simply, "Well, I guess we are
always doing the right things for the wrong
reasons." I had thought I was planting
rosebushes in order to have roses. It now seems I
was actually planting rosebushes in order to have half an
hour of silence with this magical animal every morning and
every evening.
One of my patients, a woman with ovarian cancer, told me
this: "Before I got sick, I was very certain of
everything. I knew what I wanted and when I wanted
it. Most of the time I knew what I had to do to get
it, too. I walked around with my hand outstretched
saying, 'I want an apple.' Many times life would
give me a pomegranate instead. I was always so
disappointed that I never looked at it to see what it
was. Actually, I don't think I could have seen what
it was. I had the world divided up into just two
categories: 'apple' and 'not-apple.' If it
wasn't an apple, it was only a not-apple. I had
'apple eyes.'"
Embracing life is actually a choice. When asked to
describe her husband, another of my patients, laughing,
tells this story about a visit to Hawaii that has become
part of her family's mythology. An organized and
frugal man, her husband had reserved compact rental cars
on each of the four islands months in advance. On
arriving on the Big Island and presenting their
reservation to the car rental desk, they were told that
the economy car they had reserved was not available.
Alarmed, she watched her husband's face redden as he
prepared to do battle. The clerk did not seem to
notice. "I am so sorry, sir," he
said. "Will you accept a substitute for the
same price? We have a Mustang
convertible." Barely mollified, her husband put
their bags in this beautiful white sports car and they
drove off.
The same thing happened throughout their holiday.
They would turn in their car and fly to the next island,
only to be told that the car they had been promised was
not available and offered a same-price substitution.
It was amazing, she said. After the Mustang, they
had been given a Mazda MR-10, a Lincoln Town Car, and
finally, a Mercedes, all with the most sincere
apologies. The vacation was absolutely wonderful and
on the plane back, she turned to her husband, thanking him
for all he had done to arrange such a memorable
time. "Yes," he said, pleased, "it
was really nice. Too bad they never had the right
car for us." He was absolutely serious.
One
of my favorite Christmas videos (though it's actually
about Three Kings Day, January 6, when the Spanish
children traditionally receive gifts):
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Be patient with yourself and persevere in bringing
yourself back to what is around you. Practice is
the key to altering your mind's habits. Notice
your mind wanting to be elsewhere. Be aware of
it wandering in search of immediate pleasure or
focusing on a problem that's bothering you. Then
gently bring yourself back to the sights and sounds
around you. Just keep remembering that word
"notice"--and congratulate yourself every
time you do.
Even when I am in my favorite wild places, I can find
it challenging to remain aware of nature. I can
go for a walk through a beautiful wood on a glorious
sunny day but find myself completely distracted by a
constant stream of erratic thoughts and be struggling
to connect with life around me. Moments like
this can be intensely frustrating. However, I
have learned that all I can do is notice my agitated
mind, let it be, and patiently keep bringing my
attention back to the sunlight on the leaves, the
sounds of the forest, and the chirping birds.
Sometimes my mind will settle, at other times it
won't. But no matter. The important thing
is just to keep practicing and enjoying any
discovering along the way. Remember that every
time you notice, your awareness is growing a little
more and you are opening up to a little more happiness
and freedom in your life.
On Deeper Appreciation
The natural world can calm us, energize us, and bring
us happiness. If I have successfully encouraged
you to seek out and invite a little more nature into
your life for these reasons, then this book will have
done its job. We all want to be happy and I
cannot emphasize enough how important it is to simply
enjoy our natural home. However, as we deepen
our practice of mindfulness of the natural world, our
awareness can begin to take us even farther, toward a
more intrinsic appreciation of nature.
What do I mean by intrinsic appreciation? Simply
that appreciation of the natural world can be
experienced on different levels. We can all
appreciate nature as we feel uplifted by a sunny day,
happier having seen colorful flowers in the park,
invigorated after a swim in the ocean, or calmer after
a long walk along a nature trail. However, as we
become more and more acquainted with nature's infinite
tapestry of forms, patterns, colors, sensations,
tunes, scents, and textures, we may start to open up
to a more intrinsic appreciation, where admiring the
beauty of the natural world becomes an end in
itself. We can begin to realize that we are no
longer spending time with nature because it is good
for us and has benefits for our well-being.
Instead, we begin to look at the wonders of the
natural world for their own sake, for no reason other
than the delight of being in such close proximity with
their beauty.
Falling in Love with Nature
This deeper appreciation is more akin to what we may
call love. When I say love, I am referring to
the feeling you have when you let go of your
controlling mind and give in to being completely
absorbed by the object of your awareness. Most
of us have experienced, even unknowingly, how our
sense of separate "self" disappears when we
are completely engaged in what we are doing or
experiencing. We have all abandoned our sense of
"selves" to being captivated by the sight of
a loved one, the sound of our favorite music, the
story of an engaging book, or the trance of the rhythm
of our morning run. As our sense of
"self" starts to dissolve, our minds tune in
more wholly to what we are seeing and experiencing,
and our habitual feelings and patterns of thoughts and
behaviors become more spontaneous, open-ended, and
creative. It is as if we begin to let the world
animate us as we animate it in return. In the
case of music, for instance, you may literally begin
to feel yourself animated into dance, movement, or
song in response to being absorbed by one of your
favorite pieces. The perceived separation
between your sense of "self" and the music
disappears and you become an integral part of the
music as the rhythm flows through your body.
You may argue that falling in love is an especially
personal thing, and maybe not everyone will feel love
for the natural world. Nevertheless, we are all
nature. If we love ourselves, then a love for
all other living things is innate to us. If we
treasure life, we will treasure the natural
world. And who doesn't treasure life?
from her book Mindfulness and the Natural World
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.
What we need to do is learn
to work in the system, by which I mean
that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every
component is there not for competitive profit or recognition, but
for
contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis.
W. Edwards Deming
Friends
and Acquaintances
I have very few
friends, when all is said and done. Don't get me
wrong--I like people a lot, and there are a lot of
people whom I like. There are also people who like
me, for whatever reasons there may be. But one of
the reasons for which I say I have few friends is
because I used the word very sparingly--it's a very
important word for me, and I don't assign it quickly and
arbitrarily just to someone I get along with. To
me, the word "friend" is a very special word
that must be applied to very special people in my life.
I have a lot of acquaintances. These are people
with whom I get along very well and whose company I
really enjoy. I like to spend time with them, and
they seem to like to spend time with me. But
they're also people with whom the relationship doesn't
go extremely deep, and I'm pretty sure that if problems
were to arise in my life, I wouldn't be able to depend
on them if I needed them; and on the other hand, if
problems were to arise in their lives, I don't feel that
they would call on me for help.
Why is this important for me to keep in mind? Much
of the issue has to do with expectations: I don't
want to build up false expectations in my mind about the
people I know. I cannot depend upon an
acquaintance the same way that I can depend upon a
friend, and if I know that, the chances of being
disappointed by people are much, much smaller. And
if I'm not disappointed in an acquaintance for not being
there for me when I need someone, then it's really easy
for me to maintain the acquaintanceship and still have a
good person in my life.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few,
and let those few be
well tried
before you give them your
confidence. True friendship
is a plant
of slow
growth, and must undergo and withstand the
shocks of
adversity
before it is entitled to the appellation.
George Washington
If I consider a person
to be an acquaintance rather than a friend, that
doesn't justify it if I decide to treat them not as
well as I would treat a friend. It's still
important that I care about them and for them, and
that I treat them as well as I would treat a
friend. Yes, there are certain things I won't
share with them; yes, there are times when they
won't get an invitation to something special; and
yes, I may not show them the same level of support
that I would show a friend (especially if I know
that they have closer friends who can accomplish
much more than I could). But in the end, I
agree with the Dalai Lama below, when he says that
we need to show concern about the welfare and rights
of others, that we need to be a genuine
friend, and we should try to be that to others
without expectations of reciprocal feelings.
My thoughts about friendship are bound to be
different than other people's--I keep that in mind
always. Being raised in a military family, my
siblings and I never were able to actually keep
friends that we made because we were moving away
every couple of years as our father received new
orders to be stationed in a new place. Just
when we were starting to get comfortable with new
people, we would be uprooted and move to a new place
where we knew no one at all, so we never had the
benefit of developing deep, years-long
friendships. In some ways this was a huge
disadvantage, and I think those disadvantages are
fairly obvious.
In some other ways, though, this dynamic did have
advantages. We became very resilient and able
to function on our own--we didn't develop
dependencies on others, and we've always been quite
independent (though often, too
independent). One of the things that this
helped me with personally was that it gave me the
ability to get by without feeling that I had to hold
on to things, especially people. I see many,
many people who say that a certain person who treats
them poorly is actually a friend, and it hurts me to
see them use that important word to describe a
person who most certainly is not a friend. I
know people who have over a thousand
"friends" on Facebook, and there the word
is just used in a ridiculous way, nowhere close to
its original meaning.
To have a true friendship, you have to do more than
exchange
Christmas cards or call each other once a year. There has to be
some continued support and attention; otherwise the relationship
is a sentimental attachment rather than a true friendship.
Dolores Kreisman
Friends need to be
close to us, they need to be dependable, and they
need to care about us and for us. Likewise, we
need to be those things for the people whom we call
friends. Is that setting the bar too
high? I don't think so--because I see
absolutely no problem in considering someone an
acquaintance rather than a friend. I still
love the other person just as much, and I'm still
going to treat that person just as well as I would
treat a friend of many years.
Perhaps most of my issue is a question of semantics,
then. Maybe it's just that I don't want to
assign a certain word to certain people. But
that's only on the surface, because there is still
the question of what can I expect from an
acquaintance versus what can I expect from a
friend. Which must be followed up with the
question of how I expect myself to react to a friend
in need versus how I expect myself to react to an
acquaintance in need. Of course, whenever
there's need, we should be ready to help--we may not
always need to do so, but we should be prepared
to. Having a clear distinction in our mind of
the relationship can help me to determine what kind
of response is appropriate of me, and what kind of
expectations are appropriate, also.
After all, I wouldn't respond the same to my
daughter who's having a certain problem as I would
to one of my female students who's my daughter's age
who's having the same problem. Nor would that
student expect me to do so, for the relationship is
completely different.
Genuine
human friendship is on the basis of human
affection, irrespective
of your position.Therefore, the
more you show concern about the welfare
and rights of
others, the more you are a genuine friend.The more
you remain
open and sincere, then ultimately more
benefits will come to you.If you forget
or do not
bother about others, then eventually you will
lose your own
benefit.
And perhaps that's
what this is all about--being able to define a
relationship as a friendship or an acquaintanceship
can help us to have realistic and healthy
expectations of and about others, and of and about
ourselves in relationship to others. If we
have a clear vision of just what a relationship is,
we can respond appropriately when necessary, without
agonizing over what we should do, or feeling guilty
later for not doing enough, or for doing too much
and this alienating someone who found that we acted
inappropriately.
I'm much more concerned about being a friend than
about having friends, because my actions are under
my control, while the actions of others are outside
of my realm of influence. But when I consider
whether someone truly is a friend or not, I think
that it's important to be realistic. There's
absolutely nothing wrong with considering someone to
be an acquaintance--I know that many people consider
me to be just that, and not a friend, and that's
absolutely fine with me. Perhaps one day I
will be a friend to them, and perhaps not, but not
everyone will be my friend, nor will I be a friend
to everyone I know.
Creativity
can replace conformity as the primary mode of social
being. . . . We can cling to that which is passing, or has
already passed, or we can remain accessible to--even
surrender to--the creative process, without insisting that
we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our
institutions, or our planet. To accept this
challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to
find meaning.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
You
were being spiritual without even knowing it.
Creating art of any kind is an act that involves the
part of our souls we usually don't tap into on a daily
basis. We rely on our emotions, our intuition
and our heart to lead us to the finished
product. We use art to express our innermost
selves, to bring us closer to our sense of the divine.
The
trouble is, most of us haven't done anything creative
since we cut out paper snowflakes in third
grade. "I was never any good at it,"
we say. Or, "My stuff will never hang on a
museum wall, so what's the point?" It's so
easy to neglect the artist in us because most of
day-to-day living is so uncreative. We don't
need art to raise the kids or attend a meeting or pay
the bills, so we assume that it's nonessential for all
but the few people lucky enough to be able to make a
living at it.
Wrong,
wrong, wrong. If anything, we need to express
ourselves through art more now as adults than we did
as children. For one thing, it's a terrific
release for stress-- when you're totally engrossed in
capturing a still life or shaping a clay bowl, the
rest of the world automatically shuts itself out.
Shana Aborn
Enlightenment
does not consist of pretending to be where we are not;
enlightenment means being in touch with where we are and being
willing
to learn what God would have us learn from it. Sometimes the
purpose
of a day is to merely feel our sadness, knowing that as we do we
allow
whole layers of grief, like old skin cells, to drop off us.
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
™
