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December
22 |
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Today's
quotation:
Beginning
today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be
dead by midnight.
Extend to them all
the care, kindness, and
understanding you can muster, and do so with no thought of
any reward.
Your life will never be the same again.
Og Mandino
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Today's
Meditation:
Treating
someone as if they were going to be dead by midnight does
not mean asking them if you can have their car or stereo
or home entertainment center. It doesn't mean
walking up to them and saying, "I'm sorry to see you
go, and I'll miss you!" The idea, of course, is
that we would be much less likely to dwell on those
aspects of a person that we dislike or that bothers us if
we knew they would be dead soon. If you knew a
person who was going to die this evening, would you spend
your last moments with them complaining about some
personality trait? Would you argue with them just
for the sake of being right? Extending
"all the care, kindness, and understanding you can
muster" to all of the people you know would be an
arduous task, no doubt, but not impossible. Just as
everything else in the world, it would take practice-- it
would take a lot of effort to get really good at it.
But would it be worth it?
Imagine
what your world would be like if you were able to do this
with everyone-- how would people treat you if they knew
they were going to encounter sincere kindness whenever
they were around you? Ironically enough, there are
probably many people who would avoid you if you were to
act this way, but that simply shows that they're not ready
to care for themselves, and it's hard to have someone else
care for them. But the others, those who are good to
themselves and who understand goodness when they see it--
their lives would be enriched by you, and they would
love being around you. And you would love being
around you, too, for you would recognize that you're
spreading very positive things around with the people you
know and the people you do business with.
As
Og says, "Your life will never be the same
again," just as much because of the way you treat
yourself as because of the way you treat others.
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Questions to
consider:
How much care, kindness, and understanding do
you extend now?
Why does something like this take effort, practice, and
perseverance?
Why don't more people look at this as a valid life
philosophy? |
For further
thought:
Our
lives are also fed by kind words and gracious behavior.
We are
nourished by expressions like “excuse me,” and other
such simple
courtesies.
Our spirits are also richly fed on compliments and
praise,
nourished by consideration as well as whole wheat bread.
Rudeness,
the absence of the sacrament of consideration, is but
another mark
that our time-is-money society is lacking in spirituality,
if not also in its enjoyment of life.
Ed Hays |
more
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