Another
beautiful day is here with us on this planet, and
we're thankful that you're
here with us to share it! Today we share some
thoughts with you from people who
have tried to share with us their insights into
life, and we hope that you're able to
find something here that's relevant to your life and
interesting to you.
The
true joy of humankind is in doing that which
is most proper to our
nature; and the first property
of people is to be kindly affected
towards them that
are of one kind with ourselves. -Marcus
Aurelius
I still find each day too short
for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I
want to take, all the books I want to read,
and all the
friends I want to see. The longer I live the more my mind
dwells upon the beauty and wonder of the world. I hardly
know
which feeling leads, wonderment or admiration.
-John Burroughs
Reputation is what men and women think of us;
character is what God and the angels know of us. -Thomas Paine
I
arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the
world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to
plan the day. -Elwyn
Brooks White
For all
we know, we could wait at a red light and it might never
change. That's happened before. Or, it could
start flashing amber. Or, it could change to
blue. Or, stranger things could happen. When
we have set ideas about how things should manifest, of how
things will happen to us, we're limiting the possibilities
of luck, chance connections, grace, and miracles.
When we're set on something, and it has to happen that
way, we're closing the door to wonderful surprises.
When a hand keeps grasping after something, it's not open,
waiting to receive.
We have
expectations about everything in life. We expect
that something will come in the mail, that we're going to
have a fantastic vacation, that a stock will rise 40
percent by January, that the new people in our lives are
going to do wonderful things for us, that our children
will succeed in life. By projecting these
expectations, we're attempting to order reality. Not
only are we proclaiming how reality should be but we're
also deciding that we know what is best for us.
This is
the height of egotism. Ego or I-ness cuts us off
from our Source and separates us from our Higher
Power. The force of ego is about making its own
mountain for all the world to see, and standing tall at
its summit.
The force of love is
about serving our Higher Power, glorifying that divine connection,
and letting our ego slip away while we flow freely in the stream
of life, striving to realize the heart-felt goals that express our
highest, best Self.
As our
spirituality develops and we live more in higher consciousness, we
exist more fully in the present. Existing in present time,
we're less aware of ourselves and time, flowing in that higher
consciousness, so that time begins to feel almost elastic and
almost nonexistent. That elasticity is the beginning of
eternity. Beginning to enter into eternity is not possible
unless the ego is surrendered. When we're attached to our
expectations--in effect, demanding that events unfold according to
our will--we are energizing our ego and telling our Higher
Power that we know best.
Relinquishing
expectations is not being passive. It's the opposite; it's
freeing ourselves to concentrate on the task at hand and to flow
with what is truly so. What is so is the reality occurring
now, which we need to recognize and respond to.
Eliminating
expectations does not at all mean that you stop your good
intentions. You can form the intention and let go of it,
letting your Higher Power work out the details in your best
interest. That is humility. A humble person can have
potent intention but relinquish nitty-gritty expectations about
the how and when. In humility, you surrender to your Higher
Power and want your attention free to be with that Higher
Love. The greater the immersion in that Higher Love, the
less strident the ego's demands.
Eliminating
expectations is but one small feature of inculcating
humility. Reams could be written about humility, the most
beautiful of virtues and the most difficult ultimately to
receive. For ultimately, humility is not grabbed, as if you
are a corporate raider intent on amassing the most virtuous
spiritual portfolio. It's a very slow, natural process.
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During some of my presentations, I take an 8 1/2 x 11
piece of white paper and make a little black dot in the
middle. Then I show the sheet to people in the
audience and ask them what they see. The majority
will say that they see a black dot. Very few, if
any, will tell me that they see a white sheet of paper
with a tiny black dot.
We tend to look at our lives in very much the same
way. We have our health, enough food to eat, a job
that pays the bills and allows us some leisure
activities, but we don't focus on that. We don't
appreciate that.
Instead, we concentrate on the tiny black dot - the 10%
in our lives that we don't like. . . or the things we
wish we could change. By concentrating on the 10%
that represents our problems or things we don't like, we
develop a negative attitude and feel lousy. Plus,
there's a universal principle that comes into play: we
attract what we think about most.
By focusing on what is lacking in our lives, we create
more experiences of scarcity.
Think about your life. Are you paying too much
attention to the 10% that isn't what you want it to be,
as opposed to the 90% that's going well? I'm not
saying we should ignore our challenges or things we'd
like to change. But if we paid a lot more
attention to the 90% that IS working, we'd have a better
attitude and we'd get better results.
When it comes to your job, do you concentrate on all the
positive aspects of your position, or do you gripe about
your salary and your co-workers, or the fact that
someone else got the promotion you wanted?
What about the basic necessities of life? Do you
feel gratitude every day for the food you eat, the
clothing you have, the roof above your head, or do you
take all of these things for granted? Worse yet,
do you complain that you don't have more?
And let's not forget your body and your health.
How much time do you spend thinking about what IS
working? Your body is a miracle, make no mistake
about that. There's nothing "ho-hum"
about your body and its day to day operation.
Albert Einstein once said that there are two ways to
live your life: one way is as though nothing is a
miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.
Most of us walk around with a ho-hum attitude about the
miracle of our bodies. We treat this amazing creation as
if it's no big deal.
Consider this: your heart is only the size of a
fist and yet it pumps blood through your body.
Every day, the heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood
and beats about 100,000 times. That's just in one
day.
In one year, that amounts to 36,500,000 beats. And
in most cases, the heart just keeps on beating
36,500,000 times a year for many decades. Stop for
a moment and recognize the enormity of this miracle.
And, of course, you don't have to change any body parts
or beat your chest manually to keep your heart
going. It automatically beats and sends the blood
through your body with no effort on your part.
Now, let's consider your brain. The brain and
spinal cord are made up of many cells, which include
neurons. There are about 100 billion neurons in
the brain. 100 billion! Neurons are nerve
cells that transmit nerve signals to and from the brain
at up to 200 miles per hour. Isn't this amazing?
Of course, your ears. . . your eyes. . . well, I could
go on all day about the miracle of your body and how we
take it for granted. Just one final example to
drive the point home.
When you get a cold and have difficulty breathing for a
few days, I bet you'll often tell everyone that you are
congested and don't feel well. When the cold
clears up in a week and your breathing returns to
normal, you probably don't say: "My breathing
is perfect today! I'm able to get all the oxygen I
need!" Why does it make sense to complain
about your breathing for the one week it is impaired. .
. while failing to acknowledge the other 51 weeks when
your breathing is full and healthy?
Stop taking this incredible body for granted.
Appreciate all the things that ARE working! You're
a walking miracle, and part of an extraordinary
universe.
Some of you may feel that ignoring the black dot is not
the answer--and that you need to focus on the
black dot to improve certain conditions in your
life. Well, if you choose this route, here are
three strategies you could use:
1. Worry about the black dot.
2. Complain about the black dot.
3. Take some proactive steps to eliminate or
reduce the black dot.
The only strategy that makes sense is #3. Yet many
people select strategies #1 and #2, which only makes
them more miserable.
Be brutally honest with yourself. Are there any
areas of your life where you're ignoring the large white
sheet and seeing only the tiny black dot? Do you
see the faults of those at work or at home, and seldom
affirm people for their positive contributions to your
life? If you're like most of us, you have an
abundance of blessings, yet you're often blind to them.
If you've been staring at some tiny black dots recently,
take responsibility for that. And recognize that
nobody is forcing you to keep your eyes on the black
dot. You've developed the habit of focusing on the
negative and your life (and the lives of those around
you) will be greatly enriched if you start to shift your
vision toward the white sheet.
You have a choice. You can keep staring at the
black dot and telling others about all the things that
are wrong in your life, or you can begin to appreciate
your many blessings. Sounds like a pretty easy
choice to make, doesn't it?
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.
Most people are searching
for happiness. They're looking for it.
They're trying to find it in someone or something outside of
themselves.
That's a fundamental mistake. Happiness is something that
you are,
and it comes from the way you think.
Wayne Dyer
Awe and Wonder
I sincerely hope that I never lose the sense of awe and wonder
that I've been able to carry with me so far in my life. I
want never to lose the perspective that makes me stop and gaze in
wonder at the beauty of a sunrise or a sunset, that makes me smile
when I see the amazing face of a very young child, or that makes
me choke up when I stand before a mountain range or a Grand Canyon
or a seemingly endless ocean. This sense of wonder helps me
to appreciate the depth and breadth of this amazing planet upon
which we pass these lives, and it allows me to recognize the
unbelievable vastness of the universe in which this planet
continues to spin and fly its circular path day after day, year
after year. And that vastness helps me to stay humble and to
keep a realistic sense of perspective on life.
When we're children, awe and wonder are such a natural part of who
we are that they are effortless elements of our lives.
Almost everything that we see is new and wonderful and exciting to
us, and we want to see more of it, to get to know it better.
Our sense of wonder causes us to explore and to enjoy our
explorations, no matter what we find out. But as we grow
older, more and more things become things that we already know, so
they aren't new any more; there's no need to explore them and try
to get to know more about them. We don't wonder anymore
about most of the elements of our lives, because we start to learn
about routine, and about doing the same things and seeing the same
things each day.
Think of how amazing our computers were when we first got them,
and how wonderless they are now. They're now tools that we
use to take care of tasks and to fulfill obligations, and it
didn't take long to lose the sense of wonder that they inspired in
us. And this has happened even though the computers now have
amazing processing speeds, huge hard drives that we couldn't even
imagine twenty years ago, and display screens that even on the
cheapest computers give us a better picture than any of the
affordable television sets that even existed just thirty years
ago. They truly are amazing machines in very small packages,
and the cell phones that we have now are even more amazing--but
they've become simply something else that we take for granted and
fail to wonder at.
I
was struck by the fact that I hadn't been awed in a
while.
Did that mean
awesome things had disappeared from
my life?
No.
What it did mean was
that
I'd gotten too
caught up in
distractions and mind mucking
to recognize
anything
as
awe-inspiring. . . . I hadn't been paying
attention
to the beauty around me.
This lack of
wonder and awe, though, is not a natural part of
life--it's something that we choose to adopt as we
grow older and supposedly wiser. Sometimes we
even choose not to feel wonder or to pretend that we
don't simply to impress others with our
worldliness. "That's a nice rainbow, but
I've seen so many that are nicer."
"That's a nice rainbow, but I really do have to
text my sister right now." "That's a
nice rainbow, but I don't have the time to stop and
stare at the sky right now."
We choose not to allow ourselves to feel awe, and
thus we lose a very important part of who we are as
human beings--the ability to appreciate the magic
and wonder that surrounds us all day, every day.
But are the things that we do focus on really worth
the loss? Have we sacrificed something truly
important for something truly trivial? My
hunch is that we have, and I also believe that we
have paid an extremely high price because of this
sacrifice. As Sue says above, awesome things
hadn't disappeared from her life, but she had gotten
"caught up in distractions and mind
mucking," so an important part of her life
simply wasn't available to her, even though it was
still there all the time. In this way, our
sense of awe is directly connected to our awareness
and to our mindfulness, and a loss of wonder is a
direct result of our loss or our lack of use of our
mindfulness. And we have to ask
ourselves: Is not being mindful and aware of
wonder any way to go through life? And if it's
not, why do so many of us go through life thus?
I am mentally preparing myself for the
five-year-old mind.
I want to come down to their physical
limitations
and up to their sense of wonder and awe.
Shinichi Suzuki
The good news
is that our connection with awesome and wonderful
things is easy to reestablish, because they really
never did go away. They always are a part of
the world, and they're just waiting for us to notice
them and allow the natural feelings that arise
within us to be accepted and actually felt. As
I look from where I sit now, I see a clock that
keeps the time faithfully, and has for many
years--it's amazing to think of the mechanisms that
continue to function properly so long after it was
made. And it works because of a battery, a
small object that actually holds an electrical
charge, and continues to provide that charge to the
clock's mechanisms for more than a year!
How do they make these things? How do these
things work for so long? It truly does amaze
me. And let's not even start with the
television set that gives us a beautiful image
that's provided many miles away and comes to us via
a cable or--even more amazing--via satellite or via
a plastic disc with an aluminum coating that holds a
series of 1's and 0's that the computer decodes and
transmits as a series of pictures and sounds.
It truly is wonderful, yet it's so easy to take no
notice of it at all until the battery goes out in
the remote or it somehow stops working.
If you stop right now and look around yourself,
you'll see plenty of things that can truly inspire a
sense of awe and wonder. They're around you
right now, waiting patiently for you to pay a bit of
attention to them and to allow yourself to feel the
natural feelings of awe that are within us all, also
waiting patiently for us to allow ourselves to feel
them.
They're also going to be around you all day,
wherever you go, and allowing yourself to be awed by
them is going to be a very important part of your
day. I want to stay able to be awed by a rain-
or snowstorm; I want to feel wonder when I see the
sunrise and sunset; I still want to be awed by
skyscrapers and jets and ships and cars and books
pieces of furniture that were made half a world
away, yet found their way to our home.
True
and lasting wonder needs to be renewed regularly, even
daily. Otherwise,
life's inevitable formula will be: Wonderful is followed by
wonder-half-full,
which is followed by wonder-quarter-full, which quickly becomes
wonder-less.
If you want to make your capacity for awe as wide as the sky, you
must take
preventative action. Otherwise, you'll end up as a
wonderless wanderer
and life will cease to be a joyful adventure.
Edward Hays
Feeling awe and
wonder may be something that we put aside as we
aged, but it doesn't have to be something that we
continue to neglect and ignore. And when we do
feel that sense of wonder again, each time it's
feels like a completely new feeling, one that helps
us to recognize and appreciate our place in this
world and the marvelous complexity of the world
itself. I hope to continue to be awed until
the day I die, for if I ever lose that ability, then
things around me will seem normal and bland, and I'm
sure that I'll take them for granted. And I
have no right to take things for granted that truly
do deserve my love, appreciation, and wonder.
You
can understand and relate to most people if you look at
them--no matter how old or impressive they may be--as if
they are children. For most of us never really grow
up or mature all that much--we simply grow taller.
Oh, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear
uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the
costume is the child we always are, whose needs are
simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy
tales.
One of the major reasons why we fail to find happiness or
to create a unique lifestyle is because we have not yet
mastered the art of being.
While we are home our thoughts are still absorbed with
solving the challenges we face at the office. And when we
are at the office we find ourselves worrying about
problems at home.
We go through the day without really listening to what
others are saying to us. We may be hearing the words, but
we aren't absorbing the message.
As we go through the day we find ourselves focusing on
past experiences or future possibilities. We are so
involved in yesterday and tomorrow that we never even
notice that today is slipping by.
We go through the day rather than getting something from
the day. We are everywhere at any given moment in time
except living in that moment in time.
Lifestyle is learning to be wherever you are. It is
developing a unique focus on the current moment, and
drawing from it all of the substance and wealth of
experience and emotions that it has to offer. Lifestyle is
taking time to watch a sunset. Lifestyle is listening to
silence. Lifestyle is capturing each moment so that it
becomes a new part of what we are and of what we are in
the process of becoming. Lifestyle is not something we do;
it is something we experience. And until we learn to be
there, we will never master the art of living well.
Sometimes
it rains on the just. I believe that.
Sometimes it rains on the unjust. I believe that,
too.
But I also believe that sometimes it just rains.
Neither God nor Justice nor belief has anything to do with
it.
unattributed
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).