Today's
quotation:
When we recognize that nothing has to go right for us to be
happy,
that people do not have to behave for us to love
them, our walk home can be surprisingly simple.
We have enormous power not to manipulate the world, but to be
happy and
to know peace.
Hugh Prather
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Today's
Meditation:
What
do we use our power for? Do we try to manipulate the
world, making things turn out the way we feel they should
turn out (for the good of everyone, of course), trying to
make everyone act as we think they ought to act and to
make everything turn out just so? If we do act this
way, guess what? We're setting ourselves up for
failure after failure, for there's really no way that we
can make others act the way we want them to or to make
sure that everything will turn out the way we think it
should.
We
can use our power instead to ensure that we're doing the
things we know we ought to do, that we're behaving as we
should, that we're giving as much as we're able to the
world. We can use our power to spread love and
encouragement and words of hope. We can use our
power to be there when others need us. We can use
our power to love unconditionally, instead of putting
conditions on the love we share with others.
We
have enormous power to know peace. We have great
power to be happy. But when we use our power to try
to control things that are out of our control, that power
is wasted.
Our
"walk home" can be very simple, depending on
where we are and what we try to do with the ample power to
control our own destinies that we've been given.
We're not here to push others in directions in which we
think they ought to go--we're here to be ourselves, to
live and to love, to be and to share.
It
really is rather simple.
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