Welcome
to the newest week of our lives! We hope that
this day finds you
ready to take what the world gives you with
acceptance and balance, and
that you enjoy all of your new experiences this
week, learning from them and
finding ways to make your life this week enjoyable
and fulfilling!
The
three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor
intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate,
to
include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong."
-Sydney J. Harris
If you imagine that once you
have accomplished your ambitions
you will have time to turn to the Way, you
will discover
that your ambitions never come to an end. -Yoshida Kenko
Modern people are frantically trying to earn enough
to buy things they're too busy to enjoy. -Frank A. Clark
If
you are too busy to develop your talents, you are too busy.
-Julia Cameron
When I was twenty-four years old, my eyes suddenly
gave out. After reading three or four minutes,
my eyes felt as if they were full of needles; and
even when I was not reading, they were so sensitive
that I could not face a window. I consulted
the best oculists in New Haven and New
York. Nothing seemed to help me. After
four o'clock in the afternoon, I simply sat in a
chair in the darkest corner of the room, waiting for
bedtime. I was terrified. I feared I
would have to give up my career as a teacher and go
out West and get a job as a lumberjack. Then a
strange thing happened which shows the miraculous
effects of the mind over physical ailments.
When my eyes were at their worst that unhappy
winter, I accepted an invitation to address a group
of undergraduates. The hall was illuminated by
huge rings of gas jets suspended from the
ceiling. The lights pained my eyes so
intensely that, while sitting on the platform, I was
compelled to look at the floor. Yet during my
thirty-minute speech, I felt absolutely no pain, and
I could look directly at these lights without any
blinking whatever. Then when the assembly was
over, my eyes pained me again.
I thought then that if I could keep my mind strongly
concentrated on something, not for thirty minutes,
but for a week, I might be cured. For clearly
it was a case of mental excitement triumphing over a
bodily illness.
I had a similar
experience later while crossing the ocean. I had an attack
of lumbago so severe that I could not walk. I suffered
extreme pain when I tried to stand up straight. While in
that condition, I was invited to give a lecture on
shipboard. As soon as I began to speak, every trace of
pain and stiffness left my body; I stood up straight, moved
about with perfect flexibility, and spoke for an hour.
When the lecture was over, I walked away to my stateroom with
ease. For a moment, I thought I was cured. But the
cure was only temporary. The lumbago resumed its attack.
These experiences demonstrated to me the vital importance of
one's mental attitude. They taught me the importance of
enjoying life while you may. So I live every day now as if
it were the first day I had ever seen and the last I were going
to see. I am excited about the daily adventure of living,
and nobody in a state of excitement will be unduly troubled with
worries. I love my daily work as a teacher. I wrote
a book entitled The Excitement of Teaching.
Teaching has always been more than an art or an occupation to
me. It is a passion. I love to teach as a painter
loves to paint or a singer loves to sing. Before I get out
of bed in the morning, I think with ardent delight of my first
group of students. I have always felt that one of the
chief reasons for success in life is enthusiasm.
II. I have found that I can crowd worry out of mind by
reading an absorbing book. When I was fifty-nine, I had a
prolonged nervous breakdown. During that period, I began
reading David Alec Wilson's monumental Life of Carlyle.
It had a good deal to do with my convalescence because I became
so absorbed in reading it that I forgot my despondency.
III. At another time when I was terribly depressed, I
forced myself to become physically active almost every hour of
the day. I played five or six sets of intense games of
tennis every morning, then took a bath, had lunch, and played
eighteen holes of golf every afternoon. On Friday nights I
danced until one o'clock in the morning. I am a great
believer in working up a tremendous sweat. I found that
depression and worry oozed out of my system with the sweat.
IV. I learned long ago to avoid the folly of hurry, rush,
and working under tension. I have always tried to apply
the philosophy of Wilbur Cross. When he was governor of
Connecticut, he said to me: "Sometimes when I have
too many things to do all at once, I sit down and relax and
smoke my pipe for an hour and do nothing."
V. I have also learned that patience and time have a way
of resolving our troubles. When I am worried about
something, I try to see my troubles in their proper
perspective. I say to myself: "Two months from
now I shall not be worrying about this bad break, so why worry
about it now? Why not assume now the same attitude that I
will have two months from now?"
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I met a couple who were determined that they were
going to train their four children in the way of
peace. Every night at dinner they gave a regular
sermon on peace. But one evening I heard the father
scream at the older son. The next evening I heard the
older son scream at the younger son in the same tone
of voice. What the parents said hadn't made any
impression at all--what they did was what the
children were following.
Implanting spiritual ideas in children is very
important. Many people live their entire lives
according to the concepts that are implanted in them
in childhood. When children learn they will get the
most attention and love through doing constructive
things, they will tend to stop doing destructive
things. Most important of all, remember that children
learn through example. No matter what you say, it is
what you do that will have an influence on them.
This is a very challenging area for parents. Are you
training your children in the way of love which is the
way of the future?
It concerns me when I see a small child watching the
hero shoot the villain on television. It is teaching
the small child to believe that shooting people is
heroic. The hero just did it and it was effective.
It
was acceptable and the hero was well thought of
afterward.
If enough of us find inner peace to affect the
institution of television, the little child will see
the hero transform the villain and bring him to a good
life. He'll see the hero do something significant to
serve fellow human beings. So little children will get
the idea that if you want to be a hero you must help
people.
A minister I know spent some time in Russia. He saw no
Russian children playing with guns. He visited the
large toy stores in Moscow, and discovered that there
were no toy guns or other toy implements of
destruction for sale.
Peaceful training is given in a few small cultures
right within our larger culture. I knew a couple who
lived for ten or twelve years among the Hopi Indians.
They said to me, "Peace, this is amazing--they
never hurt anyone."
I have walked among the Amish people myself. They have
sizable communities. Peaceful, secure communities with
no violence. I talked to them and I realized it's
because they learn, as little children onward, that it
would be unthinkable to harm a human being. Therefore
they never do it. This can be accomplished if you are
brought up that way.
When my folks put me to bed they would say to me very
wisely, "It gets dark so that it will be restful
for you to sleep. Now go to sleep in the nice
friendly, restful darkness." And so to me
darkness has always seemed to be friendly and restful.
And when I'm either walking all night to keep warm or
sleeping beside the road, there I am, in the nice,
friendly restful darkness.
Children need roots somewhere while they are growing
up, and parents might do well to choose the place
where they want to raise them before they have them.
* * * * *
read more of Peace Pilgrim's writings at
peacepilgrim.com.
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.
All my life I had been looking for something, and
everywhere I turned
someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted
their answers too,
though they were often in contradiction and even
self-contradictory. I
was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking
everyone except myself
questions which I, and only I, could answer. It
took me a long time and
much painful boomeranging of my expectations
to achieve a realization
everyone else appears to have been born with:
that I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison
Common Sense
In my experience, one of the most important parts of living life
fully is using the common sense that we've been given to help us
to make our decisions and set our courses. We all have
within us a great deal of wisdom that tends to be obscured by the
vast amounts of information and entertainment to which we subject
ourselves, and often we feel desperate for answers when very
simple answers are readily available to us all the time--as long
as we access our common sense and trust it. Far too often we
think far too much; I can't even begin to count the number of
times I've told students that they're not able to find the answers
they need because they're over-analyzing and thinking far too
much. And I can tell them that because I recognize it,
having done myself the exact same thing so often.
Because we think so much, the use of common sense is far less
common than it should be. I don't think that we lose it, but
I do believe that we too often decide to forego the common sense
approach because it seems too simple or because we want to impress
others with our ability to reason. But common sense can be
one of the most valuable guides that we have, and it can help us
through all sorts of problems and difficulties. Common sense
sees simple solutions instead of complex ones; it see
straightforward approaches rather than strategies that force us to
work our through a difficult maze of steps and procedures.
The three great essentials to achieve anything
worth while are first, hard work; second,
stick-to-itiveness;
third, common sense.
Thomas Alva Edison
Common sense
has been called the combination of knowledge and
experience, but that seems to be only the cover of
the book. We also have to be able to make
connections between what we know, what we've seen,
and what we've done so that the next time a similar
situation comes up, it will be easy for us to make a
decision based on what we know may be the results of
that decision.
What are some
examples of common sense? For example, if you
place a heavy plate full of food on the edge of a
flimsy table, there's a good chance it's going to
fall. If you're going very fast in your car
and you need to stop, it's going to take you longer
to do so. If you click on something and you
don't know what it is, there's a good chance it's
going to cause you problems. If you spend all
your money today, then you probably won't be able to
pay the bills that are due next week.
Generally, we think of common sense as an "if.
. . then" concept, and our problems arise when
we ignore the facts that we really should
know. After all, the very term "common
sense" indicates that one doesn't need to be a
genius in order to understand the concepts.
Our problems with common sense arise when we ignore
it. If we put that plate full of food on the
edge of a flimsy table, instead of having a nice
relaxing meal, there's a good chance that we'll end
up cleaning up a mess, losing some perfectly good
food, and maybe even breaking a good plate.
How many car collisions happen because people ignore
common sense? After all, common sense does
tell us that we shouldn't drive after drinking,
doesn't it?
At school, I often see ridiculous things happen
because administrators feel pressured to follow
complicated procedures when there are simple,
common-sense solutions to problems. I saw a
school go into lockdown because a student had shot
another student with a self-made bow and arrow--that
he had made from toothpicks. I've seen
students suspended for extremely minor offenses,
while other students who have done far worse things
have merely gotten a slap on the wrist and a warning
because there were no rules written for their
offenses. Common sense is often left outside
the door when administrators walk into their offices
because they're so afraid of making mistakes that
they rely far too much on written rules to make
their decisions for them.
A fifteen-year-old recently decided to streak across
a football field, a pretty harmless stunt when all
is said and done. School administrators,
however, decided to threaten criminal charges which
would have required the boy to register as a sex
offender for the rest of his life if he were found
guilty. Overwhelmed by the response to his
silly prank, the boy hanged himself.
It is a thousand times better to have common sense
without
education than to have education without common sense.
Robert Green Ingersoll
The news is
full of stories of people who have violated minor
drug possession violations in prison for years
because of supposed "three strikes" laws,
while people who commit far more serious crimes get
far more lenient crimes. Alabama has a law,
for example, that requires life imprisonment for a
fourth felony conviction, even for something as
minor as stealing a bike. Does it really help
the state to be paying to support that person in
prison for his or her entire life? Does it
really help society to use public funds to pay for
such a thing to keep minor thieves off the streets?
If we're to make this world a better place and make
our lives richer, we really do need to pay closer
attention to common sense. It's a gift that
has been given to us that can help us to make the
world and our lives much more enjoyable and much
less stressful, but we choose so often to ignore
it--or we get so caught up in thinking that we don't
recognize it when we see it--that sometimes it's
completely useless because we don't take advantage
of it. Often, we get so caught up in how other
people say things should be that we really don't
consider how they really should be, and how
they actually would be if we weren't so concerned
about how those other people view us when we do
allow common sense--instead of the expectations of
others--to be our guiding principle.
Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they
are,
and doing things as they ought to be done.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
We can find
success in business, in relationships, in hobbies,
in challenges that we undertake, if only we can tap
into the common sense that we already possess.
Perhaps we'll need to learn how to do so, and the
common-sense approach to doing so simply says that
we should spend more time with people who use their
common sense regularly, as we learn from example far
more effectively than we learn from theory.
Perhaps our grandparents have much more to teach us
than we give them credit for. And if we don't
have many people like that in our lives, then
reading books that focus on common sense (Dale
Carnegie and Rachel Naomi Remen leap to mind) can
help us by providing examples that we can emulate.
And it's important not to forget that we can be
common sense role models, especially for our
children, but also for our families, friends, and
co-workers. When we value our common sense and
make use of it consistently (and show positive
results from it, of course), we can help others to
see the value of tapping into their own common
sense. And imagine what our world would be
like if we all were to value common sense and use it
regularly in our lives. It may not turn into
heaven, of course, but it would become a place in
which far more things made sense than they seem to
do now.
Our inability to see the
beauty doesn't suggest
in
the slightest that beauty
is not there. Rather, it
suggests that we are
not
looking carefully
enough
or with broad enough
perspective to see
the beauty.
Norman Cousins was in his late forties when he was diagnosed with severe arthritis.
He needed painkillers to get through the day, and sleeping pills to sleep at night. And his doctors told him that his days were numbered.
Cousins remembered reading somewhere that stress and painful emotions might negatively affect the immune system.
At the time, this was merely a hypothesis, but Cousins was convinced that it was true.
Armed with his conviction, he decided to do battle with his disease. He left the hospital and began his own self-prescribed alternative treatment whose main component was laughter.
He watched Marx Brothers movies and hired a nurse to read him funny stories.
He soon discovered that after enjoying a dose of belly laughter, he was free of pain for a couple of hours.
Eventually, the treatment was so successful that he was completely off sleeping pills and painkillers and returned to work.
It took the scientific community years to catch up with Cousins’s findings.
Today you can find countless studies that illustrate how laughter can alleviate pain and strengthen the immune system. Through the tireless work of Patch Adams, the medical clown, and many others around the world, humor has been embraced as an important component of the healing process.
You don’t need the excuse of illness to bring more humor to your life and enjoy higher levels of happiness, better relationships, and improved health. Introduce levity into your days: Watch a favorite TV program, read jokes on the Internet, or meet up with a friend who makes you laugh.
Tal Ben-Shahar Choose the Life You Want
Reaching
for Happiness
Know that. . .
You can't be all things to all people.
You can't do all things at once.
You can't do all things equally well.
You can't do all things better than everyone else.
You are human like everyone else.
So. . .
Find out who you are, and be that.
Decide what comes first, and do that.
Discover your strengths, and use them.
Learn not to compete with others,
because no one else is in the contest of being you.
Then you'll have. . .
Learned to accept your uniqueness.
Learned to set priorities and make decisions.
Learned to live with your limitations.
Learned to give yourself the respect that is due.
And you'll be a most vital mortal.
Dare To Believe. . .
You're are a wonderful, unique person.
You're a once-in-all-history event.
That it's more than a right to be who you are.
That life is not a problem to solve,
but a gift to cherish.
And you'll be able to stay one up
on anything that tries to get you down.
We
are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood.
To hate people because they were born in another country,
because they speak a different language, or because
they
take a different view on this subject or that, is a
great folly.
Desist, I implore you, for we are all
equally human. . . .
Let us have but one end in view: the
welfare of humanity.
Johann
Amos Comenius
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).
™
