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Today's
Meditation:
I think it's important that we sometimes sit down and
ask ourselves just how others have gained from our
presence on this planet. And the benefit doesn't
necessarily have to be direct, either--the mother who
raises the son or daughter to be a teacher who helps kids
to reach their potential also has benefited those
kids. And I know that I've gained benefit from
thousands of other people in the world, from the people
who made this computer to the people who made the tomato
soup that I just had for dinner--people whom I'll never
meet or know, but people who nonetheless have contributed
greatly to my life.
There are many false measures of worth: the amount
of money we have in the bank, the number of friends we
have on Facebook, the number of followers of our social
media posts, the square footage of our home, the car we drive,
the number of home runs our kid has hit in Little
League. We do have to look at true measures,
though, because if we get a false idea of our worth, an
idea that we're worth more than we truly are, then it's
easier for us to stop trying, to stop pushing, to stop
working at making our worth even more.
Success can be a lonely victory. We can succeed
greatly, yet still feel lonely, confused, frustrated, and
unfulfilled. And that happens mostly because we
don't have a truly accurate measure of our success--we
have a picture that uses criteria that aren't nearly as
important as we think they are.
With a focus on what we do that contributes in positive
ways to the lives of others, we see what we're giving to
the world. When we see some of the other measures of
success, then we see what we're taking from the
world. From experience and from the words of other
people who have lived full and wealthy lives, I've learned
that probably the most important element of our lives, the
greatest determining factor of our true worth, is what we
give to the other people with whom we share this planet,
and my goal is to keep on giving until I'm no longer here
to give any more.
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