Choose
always the way that seems the best, however rough it may be;
custom
will soon render it easy and agreeable. -Pythagoras
Do
not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be
extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.
-Mother
Teresa
If
two angels were sent down from heaven--one to conduct an empire,
and
the other to sweep a street--they would feel no inclination to
change employments. -Isaac
Newton
Music
was my refuge. I could
crawl into the space
between the
notes and curl my back to loneliness. -Maya Angelou
What are the living conditions that empower us instead
of imprison us? What are the "no matter
whats" in our environment that we need in order
to grow an authentic and generous life? What I
share here now is as illustration, since it is only
true for me. Because we are unique living
systems, each of us has a unique environment in which
we flourish. It is my hope that reading my
"no matter whats" will help you tap into
your own.
No matter what, I need to be living and working in a
spacious natural environment that encourages me to
expand. Since my habit is to contract in
uncertainty, and since uncertainty is the soup of
modern life, I can most easily remind myself to expand
when I am surrounded by a wide horizon.
No matter what, I need to be moving at a rhythm that
allows my body, soul, and heart to be in alignment.
No matter what, I need to work both as a part of and
apart from the larger community. I need to work
with the family of my heart and body. Work has
divided me from them for so many years. Now I
need work to unify us, to join us in the task of
bringing shining and useful things to the larger
community.
No matter what, I need a balance of language, images,
and lavish silence, so I can be guided by the inner
voice of my intuitive mind and balance insight and
outreach. I need the space to think thoughts all
the way through until they open into wonder.
No
matter what, I need a human atmosphere that constantly
challenges me to be sane, thoughtful, wholesome, and
present in the moment. If I am not present,
there can be no meaning. If I am, everything I
do has meaning.
No matter what, I need to be living and working in an
environment that stimulates, pleases, and enlivens my
physical being.
No matter what, I need to work in a climate that is
interdependent, where the norm encourages us to use
each other's strengths so no one of us has to carry
more than our part.
And lastly, no matter what, I need to work in a
creative atmosphere that encourages me to let die what
is finished and foster new life that is trying to
emerge.
Now it's your turn, dear reader. What are the
influences, activities, and people that cause you to
shine? What is a metaphor you would use to
describe the environment that fosters your wisdom and
helps you to bring your gifts out to the rest of us
who are waiting for them? What are the
circumstances? Are you at your best inside of an
organization or with one foot in and one foot
out? Do you light up working alone, in a team,
or both? Leading, following, or both?
May we all find the soil in which the seeds of our
dreams can germinate into lives that are free of the
limitations of our previous history, lives that are
full and warm and rich with amazement.
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Every person has a different strength. A person who chooses
to live at home with aged parents, or a person who devotes him- or
herself to endless hours of labor to learn the violin or the
secrets of quantum physics has a great strength that few will ever
know. A person who masters his or her own desires for
independence and gives him- or herself over to being a kind and
loving parent is strong in a way many others could not match, but
that strength is never seen.
You need to find your own strength. There is an almost instinctive
tendency to make the false association of strength with force, and
to measure it by moments of high drama or grand flourish. We
are easily able to see strength when a man climbs a mountain or
wards of an intruder. We are drawn to him because he
overcame fear, and that is something we readily understand.
But there is much more to strength than overcoming fear. All
people are afraid of something. Some fear being hurt in a
fight; some fear not having a mate; some fear being embarrassed in
front of other people; some fear being alone. Focusing your
man- or womanhood on your fears and defining your strength by the
fears you overcome does not make you strong. It only makes
you less weak. True strength lives where fear cannot gain a
foothold because it lives at the center of belief.
Martin Luther may have put it most succinctly when he stood up for
his vision of God. "Here I stand," he said.
"I cannot do otherwise." When you can make this
your statement about something, all else falls away. You
find that your fear is overcome by your belief, your anger
overcome by your conviction. You stand in a place of immense
peace that cannot be moved, and you possess a strength that is
beyond manipulating, beyond arguing, beyond questioning.
Try to find this strength in yourself. It lies far below
anger and righteousness and any impulse toward physical
domination. It lies in a place where your heart is at peace.
Can you turn and walk from a fight when all those around you are
jeering at you and telling you you're afraid? Can you
befriend the person nobody likes even though you will be mocked
for your kindness? Can you stand up to a group of people who
are teasing a person who wants nothing more than to be part of
that group? These are the daily tests of a young person's
strength.
Can you stay away from a friend's boyfriend or girlfriend even
though you want him or her? Can you turn down a drink or a
joint if you don't want one? Can you do these things with
kindness and clarity rather than with self-righteousness?
If you can, then you are strong, far stronger than those who can
defeat you physically. Remember, strength is not
force. It is an attribute of the heart. Its opposite
is not weakness and fear, but confusion, lack of clarity, and lack
of sound intention. If you are able to discern the path with
heart and follow it even when at the moment it seems wrong, then
and only then are you strong.
Remember the words of the Tao Te Ching: "The
only true strength is a strength that people do not fear."
Strength based in force is a strength people fear.
Strength based in love is a strength people crave.
* * * *
Excerpted from his book Simple Truths. Visit Kent at
kentnerburn.com.
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.
Some people think a miracle is only a miracle
if it happens
instantaneously,
but miracles can grow slowly
and patience
and faith can compel things to
happen that
otherwise
never would have come to pass.
Boyd K. Packer
Hope
I've always had a bit of an adversarial relationship with
hope. I used to not believe in it at all, except to consider
it as an impostor, something not trustworthy and not smart to
entertain. Given the situation in which I grew up, this
perspective isn't surprising to me. Thankfully I've grown
through that perspective, and I now consider hope to be one of the
most important parts of my life, as well as of the lives of
everyone I know. Hope allows us to grow, to move forward, to
seek, and hope allows us to make our lives richer by having
something to strive for outside of and beyond our normal daily
existence.
I think that most of
us remember more the hopes that have been dashed to pieces rather
than the hopes that have come to be reality in our lives.
After all, it seems to be much easier to remember the
disappointments because we remember hurts much more strongly than
we remember good things. When we get hurt, we try to develop
strategies for avoiding hurt in the future, but if things turn out
well, we don't necessarily need to develop any strategies at all,
do we?
This is a shame, because our hope is something that we should
actively nourish, just as we should feed any part of ourselves
that needs nourishment, from our bodies to our spirits. The
fact that we don't do this hurts us, even though it's something
that should be very easy to do. I've hoped to get work and
I've found it; I've hoped to be able to see different places, and
I've been able to visit them; I've hoped that good things would
come for loved ones, and good things have, indeed, come to
pass. So why do I not remember these good things and allow
them to bolster my hope, to build it up to be stronger than ever?
Take
from people their wealth, and you hinder them;
take from them their purpose, and you slow them down. But take from them their hope, and you stop them.
They can go on without wealth, and even without purpose,
for awhile. But they will not go on without hope.
C.
Neil Strait
I think that
part of our problem is our need to see verifiable
evidence that our hope has been justified. We
need to KNOW that what we hoped for has come to be,
and we need to be able to point our fingers at the
evidence and say, "Look, there's proof that my
hope wasn't useless!" But we can't
usually do that, can we? And this is where
faith comes in--not necessarily religious or
spiritual faith, but faith in life and the laws of
life. Faith that when we do good, we're
inviting more good into our lives. Faith that
even though we can't see positive results, those
positive results still have occurred.
It's much easier said than done. In fact, hope
is one of the easiest things in our lives to lose,
because it is so hard to define and impossible to
quantify. When we hoped that today would be a
better day and it's turned out to be even worse than
yesterday was, what does that tell us about
hope? That it's misplaced and misguided and
not at all helpful? Or that no matter what we
hope, life is going to go ahead and do what life
wants? These are easy traps to fall into with
our thinking, and it's usually that thinking that
causes us to lose hope.
Whenever I feel my hope starting to wane, I have
several things that I remind myself that help me to
hold on to it. First of all, I remind myself
that the tide will not turn until it's reached its
lowest point--in fact, it can not turn until
then. And I stop thinking in terms of days--I
know that things will turn when they're supposed to
turn, and I will be okay sometime soon. There
will be signs that I need to look out for that
things will be okay, and I can't ignore those signs
(something that I tend to do when I'm feeling a lack
of hope and thus am more prone to feeling
self-pity).
Hope is both the
earliest and the most indispensable virtue
inherent in
the state of being alive. . . . If life is to be
sustained
hope must remain, even where confidence is
wounded, trust impaired.
Erik H. Erikson
I also remind
myself that untold numbers of people have gone
through similar situations to those I'm going
through, and they've come out of it fine, even
better than before. And I'm really not at all
different from them--I go through difficult
situations and I experience the loss of hope, but
eventually I will be fine. When we read about
how people have kept their hope in the worst of
times and how their lives have turned out because
they didn't lose their hope, we have role models who
have taught us the value in maintaining our hope, no
matter what. Many people have gone through far
worse experiences than I'll ever imagine, and
they've come through bruised and battered, but
they've made it because they didn't give up on hope.
When we have hope for the future, hope for change
and for better things, we have an indispensable tool
that can act as a catalyst to help us to act in
hopeful ways instead of hopeless ways. When
we're distressed because we were laid off and we've
filled out twenty job applications with no luck,
hope is what makes us fill out applications
twenty-one and twenty-two, because we know that even
if it takes thirty, we'll never get that job unless
we do fill out thirty. Hope is what has us go
to marriage counseling instead of giving up; it's
what has us start that novel even though we're not
sure we can write that much; it's what allows us to
buy all the ingredients to that dinner that we've
wanted to try to make.
Hope
works in these ways: it looks for the good in people
instead of harping on the worst; it discovers what can be
done
instead of grumbling about what cannot; it regards
problems,
large or small, as opportunities; it pushes
ahead when it would
be easy to quit; it "lights the
candle" instead of "cursing the darkness."
unattributed
Hope changes
our perspective, but only when we let it. When
we allow hope to be an important part of our lives,
we give ourselves a real chance to see the beauty
and the opportunity in life, and we give ourselves a
real chance to find opportunity in what seem to be
even the most dismal situations. We have to be
careful what we hope for, of course--hoping for a
win in the lottery or for a new relationship to
start tomorrow are two things that are bound to lead
to disappointment. We also have to be careful
not to have unrealistic expectations, especially of
other people, for those will usually lead to
disappointment. But when we combine our hope
for what may be in our lives with the action
necessary to make those things happen, we develop a
strategy of life that will definitely lead to fuller
and richer lives.
Through pride we are
ever deceiving
ourselves.
But deep down below
the surface
of the
average conscience a
still, small voice says
to us, "Something
is out of tune."
How
should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are
at the beginning
of all peoples,
the myths about dragons
that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all
the dragons
of our lives are princesses, who are only
waiting to see
us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something
helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before
you larger than
any
you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands
and over all you do.
You must think that
something is happening with you, that
life
has not forgotten you, that it holds
you in its hand;
it will not let you fall. . . .
If
I can think of myself as loved, I can love and accept others.
If I see myself as forgiven, I can be gracious toward others.
If I see myself as powerful, I can do what I know is right.
If I see myself as full, I can give myself freely to others.
Kathy
Peel
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.
™
