How would your life be different if…You stopped focusing on what you didn’t want and started focusing on what you do want? Let today be the day…You establish a clear intent, make a plan, and take actions towards your intent.
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free (via creatingaquietmind)
so what exactly is it that I want…?
Life now and again…
- lypophrenia: a feeling of sadness seemingly without a cause
- drapetomania: an overwhelming urge to run away
- escapism: a mental desire to retreat from unpleasant realities through fantasy
- wanderlust: a desire to travel, to understand one’s very existence
- dysania: the state of finding it difficult to get out of bed in the morning
- sanctuary: a small safe place in a troubling world
- metathesiophobia: fear of change
” I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in, day out” really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
—David Foster Wallace
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
~Norman Cousins
via The Heart and Soul of a Peaceful Life | A Flourishing Life
Take the time to read this short article. It has taken me a long time to realize and understand what ‘peace’ is, what do I need to do to feel at peace and where do I find it. The five points the author offers are ones I have discovered to help me feel at peace…there are a few others and my faith has guided and upheld me…but knowing how, not just seeking blindly, is a good step to living ‘a peace that passes understanding’.
“Oh, my friend, it’s not what they take away from you that counts. It’s what you do with what you have left.” ~Hubert Humphrey
New life can spring forth even in the most difficult of circumstances. Even when we think there is nothing left, life struggles to burst forth from dormancy into living anew. If a seed can do it, so can I, so can we all.
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living… Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.
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