Living Life Fully’s Daily Pick-Me-Up

I love to think of the fact that I’m in the middle of eternity now.  I love to keep in mind that eternity doesn’t start tomorrow, and it doesn’t start on the day I day–eternity is going on right here, right now, and we’re all right in the middle of it.

I am an eternal creature.  I’m not completely sure of the form I’ll take when I leave this human form, or where I’ll go or what I’ll do, but I do know in my heart and with my spirit that I don’t end when this body gives out.  And I was around before this body was created for me to grow and live in.  It’s a pretty cool thought, and an amazing realization.

When we see life as just the trappings of our humanity, then we see life in a very small way.  We see its limitations, its lackings, its barriers.  When we see life for what it is, though–an amazing opportunity to experience this wonderful planet and the wonderful people all around during our limited time here–then we see the possibility and potential that should define who we are, all the time.

You are an eternal being.  It doesn’t really serve you much to see yourself as anything but a marvelous, amazing, eternal creature who’s spending time here in your body and your current persona, before moving on to something different, but surely just as amazing.  Do yourself a favor, and treat yourself as the marvelous eternal being that you truly are.  Don’t make life small; live the grand and awesome life that you’ve been given.

Eternity is not something that begins after you’re dead.  It is going on all the time.  We are in it now.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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I think that we often think too much about taking risks.  Sometimes we over-analyze them, look at them as things that we have to “take” if we want to get somewhere in our lives, things that can have drastic negative effects on us if we don’t live up to the challenges that they present.

But sometimes I think that we should just go on with our lives and not really consider if something’s a risk or not–if it’s something that’s in our path, we should just continue on down that road and move ahead with our lives.  Whatever we do, whether we see things as risks or not, will have outcomes.  And we’ll deal with those outcomes when we need to, whether our action was perceived as a risk or not.

If we start to label things as risks, we start to distinguish them as things that we may not do, even if we want to very dearly.  If we see them as risks, we may pass up some of our most important opportunities when we decide that the risk is too great.

Of course, there are certain things that generally warrant a decision not to do them based on common sense, but it’s hard to call them risks if we never even consider doing them.  If we decide not to walk on a bridge made of old, decayed wood, we could hardly say we’re avoiding a risk.  After all, it would simply be foolhardy to do such a thing.  Most of our “risks,” though, aren’t physical at all, but emotional or financial or work-related.  People said that my wife and I took a huge risk two years ago when we bought a motor home to live in while we worked at the Grand Canyon for a year, but it turned out to be one of our best years ever.  We never saw it as a risk–we just saw it as a great adventure.  Now, two years later we both have better jobs than we had before we quit our jobs, and our “risk” is a beautiful set of memories.

Are you facing a risk or two in your life?  Then ask yourself if it really is a risk, or if you’re just concerned about what the potential results of an action will be.  Sometimes redefining our ideas of what’s what can help us to see our lives in much more positive ways.

Any life truly lived
is a risky business,
and if one puts up
too many fences
against the risks one
ends by shutting
out life itself.

Kenneth S. Davis

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Sometimes it’s easy to forget just what a gift we have in the sky that is above us every day.  It’s one of the most beautiful things that we have the privilege to experience, and each day it shows us a new side of itself, a new way of being, a completely new artistic achievement that far outshines anything that any human beings can create.

In some places the sky is much more expressive than in others, with amazing displays of clouds and sunsets that can make a person stop in breathless wonder just to stare at the amazing sight that the sky presents.  Sometimes it seems that the sky is boring when it’s covered by a thick layer of clouds or when it has no clouds at all and simply shows us its marvelous shades of blue.  But the sky is never boring, especially when we consider its breadth and depth, its moods and emotions, its personality and its passion.

We shouldn’t take such a thing for granted.  Gazing at the sky with an appreciation for the gift of its beauty allows us to keep in mind just what a remarkable world this is that we live in, just what an incredible gift we all have in all that is here for us to see and do and feel.

And the sky does all that it does just because.  It never shows a marvelous sunset in order to garner praise, nor does it send us a refreshing rainstorm with the idea of getting something in return.  There’s something for us to take from that, something that we should learn from.  We all can shine and we all can allow our beauty to be on display for the whole world to see all the time, even when our beauty is seeing its darker days, even when we get no feedback or return at all on that beauty.  We can shine as the amazingly creative and incredible beings that we are, all the time, and when we do so we should be just like the sky–not looking for any return on our efforts or on the gifts we give to others.  The gift of the sky is a marvelous gift, and the gift of you that you give to the world can be an even more amazing gift, for you are an absolutely amazing being.

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I’m currently teaching a dual-enrollment class at a high school.  Dual enrollment means that the students are taking a college course at high school, enrolled simultaneously in high school and in college.  For this class they get credit for a high school class and for a college class.  Almost none of them are actually ready for college.

As a teacher, I find this to be quite a dilemma.  While my instinct tells me to be kind and nurturing to students, there’s my experience that tells me that if I do that, I’m most certainly not preparing them for the rigors of college work.  So what do I do–do I treat them kindly or do I push things in the course, forcing them to reach deep inside of themselves to find what they need to meet the demands of a rigorous course that challenges their abilities and pushes them harder than they’ve been pushed before?

I know what the answer has to be.  I wouldn’t be doing my students any favors by treating them softly, giving them a decent grade and allowing them to move on to college without even proving that they’re able to work at the college level.  Sometimes it’s important to let go of the niceness, no matter how much against our nature that may go.  I could be nice to them, but then I’m not preparing them for the future.  And while I won’t actually be mean to them, I really can allow them no chance to slack off and to work below their potential, for that would teach them bad habits that could sabotage their entire college careers in the future.

Sometimes we have to treat others in ways that go against our natures.  Sometimes we have to look at what’s best for them, and choose that over what’s more comfortable for us.  I want these students to leave my class being able to function on the college level, and given their current levels, I’m not going to be able to accomplish that without pushing very hard.  People will rise only to the level that you demand of them, usually.  So if I demand a high level and then give them all that they need to reach those levels, my students can achieve what I ask of them.  It may be uncomfortable for me, but if I’m really in teaching for the sake of the students, then that truly shouldn’t matter.

The teachers who walk in the shadow of the temple, among their followers, give not of their wisdom but rather of their faith and their lovingness.  If they are indeed wise they do not bid you enter the house of their wisdom, but rather lead you to the threshold of your own mind.

Khalil Gibran

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As I grow older, I also grow more and more aware of many things.  One of the most important things about which I’ve raised my awareness is our ability to attract to ourselves different things, people, and occurrences based on how we’re feeling, what we’re thinking, and how we’re acting.  For most of my life so far, I believed that my feelings were a result of what was going on in my life and that I didn’t really have any control over them.  Now I realize, though, that things that I’ve done and said often have been the result of my feelings, and that those things have attracted results that have perpetuated–or made worse–those same feelings.

When I’ve been feeling down, for example, I’ve been acting down.  When something positive would come along, I wouldn’t trust it–I would treat it as if it couldn’t be real, or as if it couldn’t last, and guess what?  I perpetuated my own negative condition by allowing and even exacerbating my own negative thoughts and feelings.  And then I’d blame it all on the unfairness of the world!  It was actually pretty unfair of me to blame the world that way.

On the other hand, when I feel positive, and when I nurture my positive feelings by reading uplifting and inspiring material, I find that many more positive things come my way.  It is a law that like attracts like, and my positive attitude attracts things and people and events that help me to perpetuate that positive attitude.  It’s a pretty nice law, when all is said and done, as long as we take advantage of it and help it to be a positive force in our lives.

I would never say that everything bad that happens to another person is always his or her “fault.”  But I have had enough experience in watching other people live their lives that I now understand that people who often act and feel negative simply attract more into their life that help them to make that feeling grow stronger.  I’ve also seen that the people who focus on the positive and the possible tend to find more possibilities and more positive things in life than others.  It’s a fascinating law, and one that we can take advantage of to make our lives brighter, or one that we can ignore or even use to make our lives duller.  A law is a law, and what we do with our lives is what we do with our lives.

We don’t attract what we want;
we attract what we are.

unattributed

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Since I work with teens all the time when I’m teaching high school, it’s really fascinating for me to witness how adults treat the kids.  Somehow, there seems to be almost always an unspoken expectation that the kids are going to live up to what we think they should be, and among adults I rarely see unconditional acceptance for the kids just as they are.  After all, we’re adults, right?  So we know how they should be acting and what they should be doing.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth.  None of us knows how another human being should be acting.  None of us knows just how another person feels or thinks.  These are things that are integral parts of who people are, but that aren’t accessible to others.  Someone may tell us how he or she feels, but do the words adequately express the feeling?

Our children deserve our best, and our best isn’t telling them what to do.  Our best is helping them to discover who they are and what they’re good at and what they love.  Our best is helping to put them on the road to develop their own personalities and skills and talents.  Our best is accepting them unconditionally as they are, not accepting them only when they become what we think they should be.

We all want to be accepted.  We all want love and support from others, but we neither want nor need to be changed by others just because they think we should be something else.  Change comes from the inside, and it’s important that we don’t try to impose it upon other human beings, no matter what their age.  Sometimes it’s difficult to see people make mistakes and do things that we know are harmful, but at least we know that they’re learning as they go.  And we can learn along with them and even from them, if we just allow them to be themselves.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.

Khalil Gibran

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It really is quite amazing sometimes to think about just how much influence we allow other people to have over us.  If someone criticizes us, we just may take it personally and avoid doing the activity we got criticized for in the future.  If someone makes a nasty comment about the sweater we’re wearing, we may decide not to wear that sweater at all, ever again.  And all that because we so often pay a lot of attention to what other people say and do, while neglecting our own thoughts and ideas.

Perhaps we need to be a bit stronger in our reactions to such things.  Instead of passively accepting things like criticism, perhaps we could challenge the people who criticize us.  I do it all the time.  When someone criticizes me, I usually ask them “Just what do you mean?,” or “Why do you say that?”  Usually I get a pretty lame answer, and that gives me a chance to challenge them further.  “Why is it important to you what kind of sweater I wear?” I might ask, or “What criteria are you using to judge the job I did?”  Most people who criticize others are pretty shallow thinkers, and they probably haven’t thought through their criticism on more than a very superficial level, so questions like that tend to expose the truth–that their criticism is misplaced and unjustified, designed more to get under your skin than to be constructive.  And if that’s their goal, why should we pay attention to them?

If we allow others to put us down, then guess what?  We stay down.  But if we empower ourselves to challenge their misguided criticisms and insults, then we can live our lives freely, without worrying about what others think of us.  For when we’re at peace with ourselves, of course, we know that what others think simply doesn’t matter, and that we can live our lives from our hearts with no fear of being brought down by the uncaring words and actions of others.

Shrug off the restraints that you have allowed others to place upon you.  You are limitless.  There is nothing you cannot achieve.  There is no sadness in life that cannot be reversed.

Clearwater

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I found out something today that was very difficult to find out about what another person did to me and my wife.  It doesn’t really matter what or who–let’s just say that what I learned was very harmful to us, and for at least an hour I felt completely betrayed, confused, frustrated, angry, devastated, hopeless–you name it, if there’s an emotion that comes from another person doing harm to others, I felt it.  And I think that it’s that very onslaught of emotions that makes it feel so bad, that throws us into despair and even depression sometimes.  It’s like all of a sudden being forced to submerge ourselves into a sea of negative, poisonous thoughts and feelings and emotions, being completely immersed in these dark parts of life.

It used to be that such times would last much longer.  Now, though, I realize that much of the reason that I’m swimming in the negativity is that I choose not to get out of the water.  In a scary sort of way, it feels good to feel angry and resentful and spiteful.  So even though I’m making myself miserable, my mind is tricking itself into thinking that the emotions I’m going through are pleasant and should be held on to for as long as I can hold on to them.  And I buy into that trick, and I hold on to them.

That’s not to say that there’s no validity in feeling angry and frustrated and hurt.  There most certainly is validity in that when other people have done hurtful things to us.  But there comes a point at which us holding on to that hurt becomes us hurting ourselves instead of the other person hurting us.  The immediate hurt is completely from the other person.  If we’re still feeling hurt a week later, that hurt comes from us, ourselves.

I felt all those emotions for a while, but nowadays, I also keep reminding myself through the hurt that life will go on, that things will be fine, and that things will work out.  I try to keep a balance in there to keep my mind in check–as long as I keep putting positive thoughts and ideas into my mind, it can’t take over my emotions and make them all negative.  While I’m feeling bad I don’t always believe the positive things I tell myself, but I keep saying them anyway.  I don’t want to let other people’s actions control my life by controlling my moods and feelings, and I certainly don’t want my own mind to become my own enemy by convincing me that I should continue to hold onto negative thoughts and feelings!  It simply doesn’t make sense, and if it doesn’t make sense, why would I want to do it?

Is it ever too much?  Not if we see it for what it is, treat it as if it were what it is, and let it be what it is.  We will have bad times, negative thoughts, hurt and pain.  But life will go on, and so must we.  Let’s go on in ways that allow us to live full and happy lives, rather than dragging ourselves through the dirt.

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We all have walls built up around us.  We probably aren’t even aware of most of them, but they’re the parts of us that prevent us from getting what we want or becoming what we want to be in life.  These are walls that we’ve put up in the misguided idea that they’ll protect us from hurt or problems, though the truth of the matter is that we usually use them to avoid things that we’re afraid of.  Many people have walls that they build to protect themselves from “getting hurt” in relationships, but the truth of the matter is that the existence of the wall prevents them from developing healthy relationships in the first place.  “Why won’t you allow anyone to get close to you?”  “Because I don’t want to get hurt.”

It’s quite an illogical argument.  The truth is that instead of letting others hurt us through a relationship, we go about hurting ourselves by avoiding the opportunities for relationships.  It really is a vicious cycle–I push someone away from me with my walls, and then use that “failed” relationship as justification for maintaining that stupid wall that’s hurting me so badly, so often.

We really should be smarter than that.  God gave us good brains, and we should use them to see just how much we’re hurting ourselves.  Others aren’t hurting us, no matter what we may claim.  We’re simply hurting ourselves and then blaming it on others.  I spent years doing this, even though I didn’t see it at all while it was happening.  Now that I see it in retrospect, though, it’s kind of embarrassing that I was so silly for so long.

When we feel ourselves avoiding something or pushing people away for some reason, it’s important that we honestly look at our motives for doing so.  Sometimes, of course, it’s better to push certain people away from us so that they don’t bring us down.  Often, though, we do so to try to “protect” ourselves from something that we’re afraid of, such as taking the risk to care for someone else, or even taking the risk to start a relationship or friendship.  When we notice ourselves doing this, it’s important that we try to recognize the techniques that we’re using to avoid what we fear.  Those very techniques are the manifestation of the walls that we’ve built, and if we’re ever to tear those walls down, then we need to find them, accept them, understand them, and then deal with them.  Then we can take more steps towards living happy, healthy, and fulfilling lives.

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One of the most difficult lessons for me to learn is that everything that I’ll ever want or need already is here inside of me, a part of who I am, and that all I need to do is look inside myself to learn all that I’ll ever need to know.  All the time while I was growing up I was taught–mostly from poor examples and implied lessons–that what I need and want is outside of me.  But as I’ve grown older and the slightest bit wiser, I recognize that my satisfaction, my peace, my fulfillment, my learning, my love–and everything else I need and want–already are here.

It’s difficult to allow this lesson to sink in, but the lesson itself already is inside of us, too.  And when we slow down and listen and allow ourselves to feel and experience our inner selves, rather than focusing constantly on all the stimuli that come from outside of ourselves, we learn that there’s a great deal of beauty and grace inside of us, and that life is a question of setting it free so that it can be an active part of our conscious selves rather than being buried in the muck of so much of what we’ve learned that’s not very useful at all.

Thing about it–when are we taught to value all of the thoughts and ideas that are at our core?  When are we taught how to look inside to discover answers to important questions and problems?  And if we never learn how to value our inner realities, how can they ever help us to live our lives fully and completely?

I’m amazed sometimes at some of the answers and ideas that come from inside when I give up on trying to find answers and ideas.  I’m mostly amazed, though, at the fact that I so rarely allow myself to give up on trying to find them.  After all, when I do so I almost always fell what I need just coming to me, so why don’t I do so more often?

Somehow, we’ve come to value our rationality and logic so much that we don’t trust parts of ourselves that don’t depend on rationality and logic.  So we try to control outcomes, and we try to “find” answers and solutions.  But what happens if we just relax, let our minds run more freely, and allow answers to come to us, and from us?  Then we get the feeling of what it’s like to be in tuned with life, and we learn some of the most important lessons about just what we and life are like.

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