5 July  2022      

   

Good day, and welcome to the newest issue of our e-zine!  We hope
that your new month has started well and that you're able to turn
it into one of the best months you've ever spent on this planet!

Living To-Day--In the Here and Now
Orison Swett Marden

Achievement Isn't about Acquisition
Laura Quaglio

Troubling Times and Gardens to Tend
tom walsh

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Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners.  Compassion is the gate to human community.

Joan Chittister

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

the Dalai Lama

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.  We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.

Margaret Mitchell

The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.

Henrik Ibsen

   

Living To-Day--In The Here And Now

Happy the man and happy he alone
He who can call to-day his own;
He who's secure within can say,
To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.

-Dryden

"There  never was a land so dear
But found its hallelujah here."

If an inhabitant of some other planet were to visit America, he would probably think that our people were all en route for something beyond, some other destination, and that where they happen to be living is merely a way station where they unpack only such of their luggage as they need for a temporary stay.

The visitor would find very few people actually living in the here and the now.  He would find that most people's gaze is fixed upon something beyond, something to come.  They are not really settled to-day, do not really live in the now, but they are sure they will live to-morrow or next year when business is better, their fortune greater, when they move into their new house, get their new furnishings, their new automobile, get rid of things that now annoy, and have everything around them to make them comfortable.  Then they will be happy.  But they are not really enjoying themselves to-day.

Our eyes are so focused upon the future, upon some goal in the beyond, that we do not see the beauties and the glories all about us.  Our eyes are not focused for the things near us, but those far away.

We get so accustomed to living in our imagination and anticipation that we lose much of our power of enjoying the here and the now.  We are living for to-morrow, to-morrow, and yet, "When tomorrow comes it still will be to-morrow!"

We are like children chasing a rainbow.  If we could only reach it, what delight!  We spend our lives trading in "futures," building air-castles.  We never believe that we have yet reached the years of our finest living, but we always feel sure that the ideal time of life is coming.

Most of us are discontented, restless, nervous, and unhappy.  There is a far-away look in our eyes, which shows that we are not content with to-day, that we are not really living here and now, that our minds are on something away beyond the present.

The great majority of people think that the proper thing to do is to live almost anywhere except right here and now.  Many people dwell on the past with its rich but lost opportunities, its splendid chances which thay have let slip; and while they are doing this, they waste the precious present which seems of little account to them to-day, but which to-morrow will begin to take on a new value in their estimation.  It is astonishing what new virtues and forces we are able to see and develop in regretful retrospection, the moment these have passed beyond our reach.  What splendid opportunities stand out after they have gone by!  Oh!  What could we not do with them if we had them back!

. . . . If we are ever happy, it will be because we create happiness out of our environment with all its vexations, cares, and disheartening conditions.  He who does not learn to create his happiness as he goes along, out of the day's work with all its trials, its antagonisms, its obstacles, with all its little annoyances, disappointments, has missed the great life secret.  It is out of this daily round of duties, out of the stress and strain and strife of life, the attrition of mind with mind, disposition with disposition--out of this huckstering, buying and selling world--that we must get the honey of life, just as the bee sucks the sweetness from all sorts of flowers and weeds.

The whole world is full of unworked joymines.  Everywhere we go we find all sorts of happiness-producing material, if we only know how to extract it.  "Everything is worth its while if we only grasp it and its significance.  Half the joy in life is in little things taken on the run."

. . . . Resolve every morning that you will get the most out of that day, not of some day in the future, when you are better off, when you have a family, when your children are grown up, when you have overcome your difficulties.  You never will overcome them all.  You will never be able to eliminate all the things which annoy, trouble, and cause friction in your life.  You will never get rid of all the little enemies of your happiness, the hundred and one little annoyances, but you can make the most of things as they are.

The reason why our lives are so lean and poverty-stricken, so disappointing and ineffective, is because we do not really live in the day; we do not concentrate our energy, our ambition, our attention, our enthusiasm, upon the day we are living.

Resolve to enjoy yourself to-day.  Enjoy to-day, and do not let the hideous shadows of to-morrow, the forebodings, and the things you dread, rob you of what is yours to-day--your inalienable right to be happy to-day.

Just have a little heart-to-heart talk with yourself every morning, and say:  "It does not matter what comes or what goes to-day, what happens or what does not happen, there is one thing of which I am sure, and that is, I am going to get the most possible out of the day.  I am not going to allow anything to rob me of my happiness, or of my right to live this day from beginning to end, and not merely to exist.

"I do not care what comes, I shall not allow any annoyance, any happening, any circumstances which may cross my path to-day, to rob me of my peace of mind.  I will not be unhappy to-day, no matter what occurs.  I am going to enjoy the day to its full, live the day completely.  This day shall be a complete day in my life.  I shall not allow the enemies of my happiness to mar it.  No misfortune in the past, nothing which has happened to me in days gone by, which has been disagreeable or tragic, no enemies of my happiness or efficiency, shall be a guest in my spirit's sacred enclosure to-day.  Only happy thoughts, joy thoughts, only the friends of my peace, comfort, happiness, and success, shall find entertainment in my soul this day. . . ."

Remember that yesterday is dead.  To-morrow is not yet born.  The only time that belongs to you is the passing moment.  One might liken the sixty minutes in the hour to flowers, that live for only sixty seconds and then die.  If we get the good that belongs to us here and now, we must extract the sweetness of each passing minute while it is ours.  That is the real art of living in the to-day.

From his book The Joys of Living (1913).

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A favorite song:

What Are You Waiting For?
Nickelback

What are you waiting for?

Are you waiting on a lightning strike?
Are you waiting for the perfect night?
Are you waiting 'til the time is right?
What are you waiting for?
Don't you wanna learn to deal with fear?
Don't you wanna take the wheel and steer?
Don't you wait another minute here.
What are you waiting for?

chorus:
You gotta go and reach for the top
Believe in every dream you got
You're only living once so tell me
What are you, what are you waiting for?
You know you gotta give it your all
And don't be afraid if you fall
You're only living once so tell me
What are you, what are you waiting for?

Are you waiting for the right excuse?
Are you waiting for a sign to choose?
While you're waiting it's the time you lose
What are you waiting for?
Do you wanna spread your wings and fly?
Don't you really wanna live your life?
Don't you wanna love before you die?
What are you waiting for?

chorus

Tell me what you're waiting for
Show me what you're aiming for
Whatcha going to save it for?
So whatcha really waiting for?

Everybody's gonna make mistakes
But everybody's got a choice to make
Everybody needs a leap of faith
When are you taking yours?

chorus
  

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Achievement Isn't about Acquisition
Laura Quaglio

It was inevitable, really, that I should find myself surrounded by piles of Legos and Little People, games and gadgets, paper, paper, and more paper.  My husband Jim and I have two children.  With their arrival, our lives had become fuller--and with school, sports, hobbies, and home improvements, so did our house.

At first, acquiring things made me feel good. . . successful.  After years of living in a Spartan apartment and budgeting my pennies to buy "frivolities" such as kitchen towels, I enjoyed tricking-out our house with knickknacks and necessities.  Then the kids came, along with the inevitable avalanche of clothes, games, Happy Meal toys, school papers, and craft projects.  We also added more knickknacks, better dishware, new wine glasses, scrapbooking supplies (mine) and power tools (Jim's).  We lived by the bumper-sticker motto, "Whoever has the most toys when he dies, wins."  And we were going to die winners.

As the house began to bulge, we coped as best we could--buying bins, shelving, and baskets, filling drawers, tubs, and coffee cans.  My coffee-cup shelf overflowed.  So did my daughter's bookshelves and my son't T-shirt drawer.  I could no longer find anything easily.  Try searching through 800 unalphabetized kids' books to find one specific inch-thick book called The Christmas Bear 15 minutes before bedtime, and you'll get an idea of the stress that plagued me each night.

It was during one such "bear hunt" that I decided I no longer wanted more.  I wanted less.  And more of it.  The mediocre items were choking out the ones that really, truly mattered, like ivy run amok in a bed of prize roses.  I could not locate a special child's drawing amid the massive piles of notes and scribbles.  In saving twenty years' worth of my own writings, I had run out of file space for current projects.  What's more, I was finding it ever harder to have a coherent thought.  Something had to change.

I racked my cluttered brain for a solution.  Should I fill more file cabinets?  Buy more bins?  Stock more shelves?  "No, no, no!" cried a voice inside my head, from somewhere behind a stack of old childhood fears and repressed teenage angst.  (What can I say?  I saved everything.)  It had become apparent that organizing was no longer the answer.  The only solution was to purge.

I went room by room, beginning with my home office.  One bag for recyclables.  One bag for trash.  One bag for charity.  I was ruthless.  I asked myself, "Do you need this right now?"  "Would you pack this and move it to a new house?"  And "Will you care about this in 20 years?"  If the answers were yes, it stayed.  If not, it got kicked to the curb. . . or out of the office, anyway.  The house looked worse before it looked better, but in a few days, the office looked GREAT!  And over the next few months, the rest of the rooms followed suit.

If acquiring dish towels felt good a decade ago, this paring-down felt ten times better.  I could walk through a room without sighing.  I could put my feet up at night on a cleared-off coffee table.  And without all that clutter weighing on my mind, I was free to focus on things that mattered. . . like the writing that feeds my sould. . . like finding The Christmas Bear at bedtime.

I now understand that there is a fine line between success and excess.  And the next time I think we are about to cross it, you'll see me with three bags in my hand--one for recyclables, one for trash, and one for charity.
  

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Peace does not dwell in outward things, but within the soul; we may preserve
it in the midst of the bitterest pain, if our will remains firm and submissive.  Peace
in this life springs from acquiescence to, not in an exemption from, suffering.

Francois de Fenelon

   

 
Troubling Times and Gardens to Tend

It kind of seems that there are no breaks for us these days.  We're in difficult times--that's pretty much undeniable.  Whether these times are more difficult than others that human beings have passed through is debatable, but it's absolutely certain that we're facing a whole lot of adversity right now.

A comprehensive list of difficulties and adverse situations would be impossible, of course, but here's a start:  inflation that's coming at the tail end of a devastating pandemic; extreme droughts in many parts of the world, as well as the fires that are destroying huge swaths of forest; strong division between political parties that seems to grow worse each day; mass shootings here in the States that just won't end; rising housing prices that are keeping many people out of the market, even for renting; a war in the Ukraine that is completely unjustified and that is killing thousands of people; worldwide pollution that's causing possibly irreversible damage to the planet; and more--much, much more.

So what do we do?  Do we lose hope and give up and give in, letting ourselves trudge towards our ultimate demise?  We can lock ourselves in our homes and watch shows and do nothing and eventually perish along with everyone else, right?  Or do we whine and complain and blame others because we, of course, aren't responsible for what's going on?
   

Those who know no hardships will know no hardihood.  Those who face no calamity will need no courage.  Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

   
Or do we do what we can, in our own little ways, making our small contributions on a small scale and hope that the combined effect of all of us together making such small contributions may end up being significant?  Do we look for the small things that we can do that may help others, that may teach others, and trust that the ripple effect will result in those others doing their own positive small things in their own ways?

It's quite easy to say that we learn the most from adversity--the danger is, of course, that in doing so we minimize the drastic effects of such hard times.  We can't just say things like, "Don't worry about it" when people are being traumatized by what's going on; we can't dismiss the severity of the situations that we're facing with simplistic platitudes and glib words.  Yes, adversity is one of the best teachers that we can have in life, but knowing this fact doesn't make anything easy for anyone.  Reminding ourselves of this truth may help us to weather the storms we're passing through, but the truth is that times like these call for us to show our love and kindness and compassion for others much, much more than the glad times require.

So how can we do this?  How can we live life fully today when things are going badly all over the world today?

That's a very good question.  There's a Zen story, I believe, about a monk who was tending to his garden when he was asked what he would do if he knew the world would end tomorrow, or if he would die tomorrow--I've forgotten which.  But his answer is important:  he said, "I would tend my garden."  Voltaire ends his work Candide with the main character saying, "We must cultivate our garden."

I think we can learn a lot from this perspective.
    

There are not so many lessons in glad times.  Adversity is by far the better teacher.  Adversity will be part of almost all our lives.  So it is not in escaping adversity, but in answering it, that our character is defined.

Christopher Warren

    
How do we get through rough times?  By recognizing that in our own worlds, we still have work to do, and the seeming insignificance of that work on the level of the whole world means nothing--we still need to get that work done.  Today I have to change a couple of electrical outlets in my home, and that job needs to be done no matter what's happening in the Ukraine, no matter how bad the floods in Australia, no matter what this political zealot said to offend millions of people.  My most important tasks today are to focus on the things in my own life that need to be taken care of today, or to make plans to take care tomorrow of those things that can wait.

It's very tempting in times like these to come up with some sort of list, something that we can focus on to make sure that we're not wasting time worrying or feeling helpless and/or hopeless.  Lists can be fine, but they can also make us feel overwhelmed when we all of a sudden have five or six or ten things that we have to pay attention to.  But when we can focus our thoughts and efforts to tending to our own garden--in other words, our own lives--we simplify life and we don't expand our own expectations of ourselves to an unmanageable point. 
   

Certain circumstances are so overwhelmingly difficult that the best we can do to promote our eventual healing is simply to mark time, stay alive, and bear up under the worst of our suffering.

Ann Kaiser Stearns

   
It's very easy to get overwhelmed with the despair and pain in the world.  It's easy to think that we should be doing something to fix the world, or at least fix a little corner of it.  We want to make people feel better, safer, more respected, more loved.  For the vast majority of the people on this planet, though, these are things that we do to a very limited extent, with a very limited number of people.  The world is going through difficult times right now, and there's a good chance that things will get worse before they get better.  We can't let that fact pull us out of our own lives, though.  If we do get caught up in thinking about life from a worldly perspective, there's a good chance that we're going to lose our abiity to influence, in a positive way, the people and things that are a part of our personal worlds.

It's not that we can do nothing at all.  My wife and I have chosen three charities, for example, that we send money to monthly.  We know that these organizations have a much better chance at affecting policy than we personally ever will.  We don't give a fortune, and we don't fix things, but we contribute a small amount that combines with other small amounts that come together to bring strength to a group of people who are in positions that can truly help on a greater level.

How can you help the world?  By being yourself; by being true to yourself.  By giving encouragement and helping others to feel confident in themselves and their gifts.  By contributing in a very small way to something bigger than yourself.  By spreading love on this planet that definitely needs more love than we can even imagine.

   
More on adversity.

   
   

   

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Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the trade wind in your sails.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.

unattributed

  
Wishing
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Do you wish the World were better?
Let me tell you what to do:
Set a watch upon your actions,
Keep them always straight and true.
Rid your mind of selfish motives,
Let your thoughts be clean and high.
You can make a little Eden
Of the sphere you occupy.

Do you wish the world were wiser?
Then suppose you make a start,
By accumulating wisdom
In the scrap book of your heart.
Do not waste one page on folly;
Live to learn and learn to live.
If you want to give out knowledge
You must get it ere you give.

Do you wish the World were happy?
Then remember day by day,
Just to scatter seeds of kindness,
As you pass along the way.
For the pleasures of the many
May be oft times traced to one,
As the hand that plants an acorn
Shelters armies from the sun.
   

  

Hope works in these ways: it looks for the good in people
instead of harping on the worst; it discovers what can be done
instead of grumbling about what cannot; it regards problems,
large or small, as opportunities; it pushes ahead when it would
be easy to quit; it "lights the candle" instead of "cursing the darkness."

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.