Life
has very kindly provided us with another week to
live, to grow, to learn,
to achieve triumph and error, to love and to be
loved.
We hope that you're able to make the week that
you've been given a very special week.
Neither
genius, fame, nor love shows
the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.
-
Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
As I grow
to understand
life less and less,
I learn to live it
more and more. -
Jules Renard
Love is
the great transformer, turning ambition into aspiration,
selfishness
into service, greed into gratitude,
getting into giving and demands
into dedication. -
unattributed
Half of our
mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought
to think, and thinking
where we ought to feel. -
John Churton Collins
What are you devoted to? The answer determines
what kind of life you will have and how much joy you
will find.
When I devote myself to changing other people, I
have endless problems. I am compelled to
correct them. I feel I have to criticize them
when they aren't helpful and loving enough, or when
they aren't spiritual enough or don't clean up after
themselves. Improving the world by trying to
improve other people is hard work that leaves me
feeling lousy. In the end, no one, not even
me, lives up to my expectations.
Loving means devoting yourself to people, but not to
changing them. When I devote myself to the
people in my life all our lives improve. While
I am telling them how to meet my expectations, no
one is happy. As soon as I accept them as they
are and start caring about them and trying to make
their lives easier, everyone is happier and
wonderful things start happening.
Joseph Campbell told a story about overhearing a man
in a restaurant telling his child how to eat.
"Why don't you let him do what he wants to
do?" the man's wife asked.
"Because I've never done anything I wanted to
do in my life," the man answered.
Campbell contrasted that story with a passage in
Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt.
In Lewis's story,
a young man decides not to go to college. He wants to get
married and get a factory job because he likes working with his
hands. His family is giving him a hard time about his
decision, but his father takes him aside and tells him he has
never done anything he wanted to do in his life. Now, even
though the father isn't happy with the son's choices, he tells
him he admires his decision to live his life the way he wants to
live it. Then he puts his arm around his son and they go
back into the room to face the family. I gave a copy of
that passage to every one of our five children.
The more children you have, the harder it is to direct
everyone's actions. With five children, you are too busy
to tell everyone what to do and it is easier just to watch them
grow and blossom.
Our oldest son once asked why I treated the younger children
differently than I'd treated him at their age. "How
come they don't have to do what I had to do?"
"Because I've learned that a lot of the things I asked you
to do aren't important." Then I apologized for my
inexperience as a father. He accepted my apology because
my newfound wisdom made his life easier, too.
Today I am amazed at the things our children have done and their
wide range of interests. They are all living their lives
and not the ones I would have planned for them. But I have
learned their lives are theirs, not mine, and in living their
own lives they have given me experiences and an education I
would never have had if I'd been fool enough to make them do
what I thought they should do.
What are you devoted to? Think about someone in your
family whom you love. How do you behave toward this
person? Think about your interactions over the past few
days. Are you trying to change her and improve her?
Or are you watching her grow and enjoying her and trying to make
her life easier?
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In the world to come each of us will be called to
account for all the good things God put on this earth
which we refused to enjoy. -The Talmud
When I read the above quote for the first time, I
gasped. First, I felt ashamed because I knew
that over the course of my lifetime I had been given
so much. . . and had appreciated so little. Then
I felt elated. At last I had been given
"permission" to enjoy. More than
permission. I was being told that if I didn't
enjoy, there would be consequences to pay!
What a gift!
I then began consciously to look around and
notice all the good things God put on earth that I
refused to enjoy. I was shocked that I had never
noticed these things before, except in a very
superficial way. I had only glanced at things I
should have embraced. Like most of us, I had an
immense capacity for taking things for granted!
Since then I have learned that,
Taking things for granted is one of the greatest
assaults on the quality of our lives.
When we take things for granted, we never get to see
the magnitude of the gifts that are constantly being
placed before us. As a result, we feel only
scarcity instead of abundance.
It's at this point you may be asking, "What are
you talking about, Susan? Just look
around. The world is a mess!" Yes,
the world is a mess. Your life might be a
mess. And despite that fact, there is so much to
be grateful for that it staggers the imagination.
The riches of the world envelop us, yet we cannot see.
And why can't we see? We can't see because we
humans are creatures of habit. And the present
habit of our society is to focus on what is terrible
about life and ignore what is wonderful. Our
task, then, seems very simple--to stop focusing on
what is terrible in life and begin focusing on what is
wonderful. But we all know that this task isn't
simple at all. In fact, it turns out to be one
of our biggest challenges! The reason for this
is because old habits are extremely hard to
break. Yet in order to truly dance with life,
break them we must!
In order to break any habit, repetition of the
preferred behavior is a must!
Without it, you will keep falling back into old
patterns. Repetition allows you, little by
little, to shift your awareness to the sumptuous
banquet that has been set before you. And you
will wonder why previously you weren't able to see
what is so obvious now.
It was a wise person who said, "Life is a banquet
and most poor bastards are starving to
death!" As you open your eyes and really
SEE, you will starve no more. You will learn
that. . .
Your joy, your happiness, your satisfaction, and
your ability to dance with life depend solely on what
you pay attention to.
Thankfully, what you pay attention to is entirely up
to you!
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.
My wish simply
is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and
our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this
means
that we must save ourselves from the products that we are
asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Wendell Berry The Art of the Commonplace
Celebrating
Mediocrity
I've just left my job at a school district that set incredibly low
standards for its students, mainly because the school district
knew that if they didn't do so, many of their students wouldn't
ever graduate. It was getting
very frustrating to work with students who were working two to
four years below their grade levels, but who were still being told
that they were doing wonderful work. I saw nothing positive
coming out of this situation--the students were definitely not
being prepared for life after high school, and they were being
passed on from grade to grade without meeting even the most basic
of requirements for their age and grade level.
The culture of the school had become one of mediocrity by
choice--even the athletes on the sports teams had to have only a
60% average in their classes in order to be able to compete.
The message that was being sent by setting the bar so low was very
clear and very disturbing: we don't think that you can do
any better than this, so we're holding you to very low standards.
In working with the students, I saw many of them feel that all
they had to do at school was pass and get their credits, so they
were striving for one thing only--to maintain their 60%
average. There were very few students who did any sort of
extra work, who strived for anything other than doing their work
at their current level of ability instead of working to reach
higher levels of achievement. It was like a sickness that
permeated the entire school, and it was incredibly frustrating to
be around.
In
today’s culture, it seems, we don’t want to honor real
excellence for the sake of looking up to, learning from,
being inspired by and celebrating such excellence. Instead,
we too often want to lower the bar and then boast about
what is mediocrity for the sake of something as small as
personal ego. What a shame. It seems to me there
just isn’t honor in that for anyone.
Betsy Hart
But what was
worse was the fact that administrators at the school
felt the need to constantly give out awards that
were basically given because some students had met
the bare minimum standards in a certain area.
To me, awards exist to honor someone who has gone
above and beyond their normal tasks in order to
excel, or they've gone out of their comfort zone in
order to achieve something that is significant in
their lives. That's not what our awards were
for.
When I told an administrator that I would love to
give an award at a ceremony that they had at the end
of the year, but that virtually none of my students
had done anything extra or had stepped at all out of
their comfort zones, he just looked at me and said,
"Well, then, make something up."
When we start to reward effort that is no more than
average effort, just to give some sort of award,
what does that award really mean? I know that
the students who received those awards were
completely aware that they had done literally
nothing that was award-worthy, but that they had
just been chosen arbitrarily because the school
needed to give some award to someone. And
nobody talked about the awards or their recipients
with any sort of respect or dignity--everyone knew
that most of them had just been made up, and that
there were absolutely no published criteria that
anyone had to meet to receive any award.
There
does seem to be a general trend in making sure everyone
excels at something, even if it requires a little re-writing of
the rules.
And I think that this is why, these days, at least we seem to
embrace mediocrity entirely. After all, if you don't
applaud success,
for fear of upsetting those who haven't succeeded, or you have
to
alter the way people are measured to give everyone a boost, then
you risk bringing everyone to the same level. Just when, and
why,
did average become the aim for everyone, instead of a measure
of the half-way point between two extremes?
Nicola Rippon
And I need to
make one thing perfectly clear--these were great
young people, and I loved working with them. I
used to look forward to coming to school to see them
each day, and we had a lot of fun in class, and an
awful lot of learning took place. But because
no one stepped up to excel, if I had chosen one
student who had done very well, I would have been
ignoring at least six or seven others who also did
very well. If I had chosen a "most
improved" student, I would have neglected four
or five others who had improved just as much.
When I taught college, I witnessed first-hand the
dangers of rewarding students for mediocre
work. Students who had been getting A's in all
of their high school classes were suddenly getting
C's and D's on their papers in my class. In
the world of work outside of school, I've seen
plenty of recent high school graduates who haven't
been able to do basic math or write simple
paragraphs without tons of errors. When we
celebrate normal work by calling it exceptional and
giving awards for it, then we're actually sabotaging
the futures of these young people who truly need an accurate
idea of just how good they are at something.
Attend
many high school graduations today and an astonishingly
high percentage of graduates leave with honors. My experience,
corroborated by colleagues at many schools, is that this perception
of educational superiority migrates from high school to college.
Students today expect--and unfortunately too often receive--
high grades for what is in reality mediocre work.
R.W. Hafer
I was
definitely looked down upon by administrators when I refused to give
awards for normal work. Other teachers told me
that they didn't want to give awards either, but
that the administrators pressured them into doing
so. I have to say quite honestly, though, that I
feel it's very important that young people have a
truly accurate idea of how they're doing if they're
going to be prepared for their futures, and it's
important that I be true to my ethics concerning
education if I'm to be an effective teacher.
Our society is feeling the effects of young people
graduating without many of the basic skills that
they need in order not just to succeed, but to
thrive in life. It's a very dangerous
situation, one that threatens to undermine the
stability of many aspects of our culture, and the
way to address these issues is not through giving
more awards to people who haven't done award-worthy
work, but to give significant awards to those people
who truly excel or who truly step out of their areas
of comfort in order to do the best they possibly
can. After all, that's how we live our lives
fully--by giving our all to all that we do, and
doing the best we can whenever we do anything.
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
And when,
Humanity, you will return to Nature, on that day your eyes will open,
you will gaze straight into the eyes of Nature, and in its mirror you
will see your own image. You will know that you have returned to
yourself, that when you hid from Nature, you hid from yourself.
When you return you will see that from you, from your hands and from
your feet, from your body and from your soul, heavy, hard, oppressive
fragments will fall and you will stand erect. You will
understand that these were fragments of the shell into which you had
shrunk in the bewilderment of your heart, and out of which you had
finally emerged.
On that day you will know that your former life did not befit you,
that you must renew all things, your food, your drink, your dress and
your home, your manner of work, and your mode of study--
everything! On that day, deep in your heart, you will know that
you had been wandering until you returned to Nature. For you did
not know life. A different life, a life not ready-made, a life
to be experienced in preparation and creation--that life you did not
know.
Therefore your life was cut in two--a very small shred of existence
and a huge experience of non-existence, of work, of labor, of
busy-ness. You did not think, and it did not occur to you, that
there is no life in a life ready-made. Preparation is itself
Life, for Nature also lives within the preparation of life, within the
creation of life.
A.D. Gordon
If
you have some respect for people as they are, you can be
more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
John
W. Gardner
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 (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
™
