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Today's
Meditation:
There
have been times when I've lived long periods without
enthusiasm. When depression got strong, when things
just seemed to keep going wrong no matter what efforts I
made, when there simply didn't seem to be any point to
things--those were times when enthusiasm seemed to be
almost a luxury item, something extra that I couldn't
really tap into.
What I've learned since those times, though, was that the
lack of enthusiasm was not only my doing, but also the
reason for itself. I've learned that the world gives
us back what we give to it, and had I known that then, I
would have been able to give more enthusiasm to all that I
did, and then more things would have happened to me to
help me to foster that enthusiasm.
I watch many of my students approach their tasks with
almost no enthusiasm at all, and I watch them learn almost
nothing. They may perform okay on a test, but then
they forget the information or process. Nothing has
been learned. I watch other students approach their
learning with enthusiasm, and I see them actually learn
the material fairly easily, and that success that they
experience fosters new enthusiasm for new topics and new
ideas.
Sometimes we think that the "world" somehow
takes our enthusiasm, our hope, our dreams, away from
us. But really, if we've lost the enthusiasm, we've
let it slip away. And it's up to us to reclaim
it. There's no reason at all to walk through life
without one of the most helpful feelings of all.
Enthusiasm leads to great achievement with high quality,
and enthusiasm is the product of our attitude towards
whatever we're doing--and it's also the cause of our
attitude. So if we can spend time fostering anything
that will help us with our work and our relationships,
time spent on enthusiasm may be some of the most important
time of all.
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