Living Life Fully’s Daily Pick-Me-Up

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There’s a question that I’ve begun to ask myself whenever I’m in a one-on-one situation with another person.  It’s a pretty simple question, really–what does this person need?

You see, my role in any interaction is up to me.  Usually we just follow along in a simple role without giving it much thought.  If someone starts talking to us, we just start talking back, and our role is just as a participant in a conversation.  But often we have the opportunity to be something different–something more, even–if we take the time and make the effort to try to assess the situation.

For example, someone may come to me and ask for advice.  On the surface, that’s fine, and I may start giving advice.  But if I ask myself, what does she really need?, I may come up with a different response.  I may realize that she doesn’t really want advice, but just wants someone to talk to so that she can make up her own mind.  In that case, I can serve her best by listening closely, and maybe asking a few well-times questions, such as “What do you think would be best to do?”  Or I may see that the person is feeling a bit lost, and could use a little encouragement.  So rather than responding to his comment about a rough day by talking about just how rough my own day has been, I can reply by offering that encouragement, sincerely, from the heart.  The encouragement will go a lot further than just playing the one-upmanship game.

Someone who just injured himself may be afraid, and may need to talk about the injury and his fears rather than hearing about how I hurt myself in a similar way.  Someone who’s having relationship problems may need to be directed to think about how his or her partner feels rather than being given advice on how relationships work, or how to fix them.  If I truly and sincerely ask myself, “what does this person need?,” then I can serve that person in the best way that I know how.  Just falling into a casual conversation usually isn’t going to lead to the best of outcomes for the other person, so it’s up to me to try to give all that I can to anyone who needs it–and most people need something from us at least some of the time.

Always try to serve others.  Don’t even call it helping, call it service because you are benefited by that.  If someone begs from you and you give them something, you shouldn’t think you are helping them.  Instead, he or she is helping you.

Satchidananda

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I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who wants to do something very special.  He wants to do a lot of traveling with his wife, but the demands of work and home ownership keep him from doing what he really wants to do.  “I don’t have time right now,” he says.  “We’ll start traveling when I have time.”

My wife was there during the conversation.  On the way home, she said, “He reminds me of my grandfather.  He and my grandmother were always planning to travel as soon as he retired.  They were going to buy a motor home and take off and see the country during their retirement years.  He died when he was 61, though, before he had a chance to retire.  So they never got a chance to do any traveling together.”

Not everyone wants to travel, of course, but the lesson here is important to all of us.  None of us know for sure just how much time we have on this planet, so if there’s a dream that you want to go for, then what are you waiting for?  We’re not put on this planet simply to wish that we could be doing something else other than what we’re doing–we’re put on a planet full of potential and possibility and opportunity.  Our limitations are our own, based on beliefs that we develop on our own.  “I own the house, so I can’t leave it.”  “I have to have money in the bank, so I have to keep working.”  All of these beliefs may be fine for some people, but are they really fine for everyone?  Do they really serve everyone extremely well?  If they keep us from living our dreams and following our hearts, then I suppose the answer must be “no.”  And of course, if your dream is to own a home and have consistency in your life, then there’s no problem with doing that!

I never put anything off until I have time.  Time is something that none of us are guaranteed, and assuming that we’re going to have plenty of it is simply a method of fooling ourselves, of making ourselves feel better about putting off what we really, truly want to do with our lives.  That won’t always turn out well–just ask my wife’s grandparents.

Know the true value of time!  Snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it.  No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination.  Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Philip Chesterfield

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Sometimes I think that my mind is just like a river, always changing, always moving, like water rushing on its way and smashing into rocks and cliffs and banks as it makes its way downriver.  There’s even the roar just like that of the rushing water sometimes, a roar that overwhelms the silence and keeps me from feeling the peace that could be mine.

But not all water is rushing.  There’s a lot of water that sits still, reflecting the light of the moon and the stars, silent and peaceful and lovely.  I’d like to say that sometimes my mind feels like that, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t know if it ever truly has or not.  It is one of my goals to get my mind to feel that way, but so far I’ve never been able to attain what I would call a deep sense of mental peace.  I do try, but my thoughts always seem to find a way to trickle out and join up with other thoughts and once more become a raging river.  And even though I’m tempted to say, “That’s just the way I am,” I know that the truth is that I still haven’t learned how to control my thoughts well enough to slow them down and keep them at peace like a quiet pond at the base of a mountain, surrounded by trees.

I am getting closer, though.  And the closer I get, the more I see the benefit of slowing down and giving myself nothing particular to do for a certain period of time, be it ten minutes, half an hour, or an hour.  Giving myself the gift of nothing to do for a time allows me to slow my thoughts down and to get a glimpse of what it would be like if I were able to truly still my mind.  I don’t know what will eventually allow me to do it, but I do know that as I search, I do get closer to finding that peace.

The one thing I know, though, is that I have to keep trusting life to teach me what I need to learn, when I need to learn it.  I have a feeling that such a peace will be wonderful for me when I find it, but that it probably wouldn’t be as good for me right now.  In my current work I need a certain amount and a certain type of tension to keep me at the top of my game, and while my times of peace and stillness are great and very helpful, I have a feeling that in the future they’ll be much stronger–when I’m doing work that doesn’t demand the tension that I need right now to work well at what I do.

Peace is there, for all of us.  And if we keep our minds and hearts open to the lessons that life gives us constantly, then we will find that peace–when we’re ready for it, and when it will serve us best in our lives.

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Today feels like a very good day to let someone else speak, so here are some special words from two of my favorite people:

Why do we protect children from life?  It’s no wonder that we become afraid to live.  We’re not told what life really is. We’re not told that life is joy and wonder and magic and even rapture, if you can get involved enough.  We’re not told that life is also pain, misery, despair, unhappiness, and tears.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to miss any of it.  I want to embrace life, and I want to find out what it’s all about.  I wouldn’t want to go through life without knowing what it is to cry.

Leo Buscaglia

Life is short.  Each year passes more quickly than the previous one.  It’s easy to deny yourself many of life’s simple pleasures because you want to be practical.  Forget about practical and decide instead to become a joy collector.  Always be on the lookout for gifts without ribbons.  God is strewing them across your path right now.  His gifts come tagged with a note:  “Life can be wonderful.  Do your best not to miss it!”  Enjoy what it is before it isn’t anymore. . . . Dare to slip on a pair of bunny slippers once in a while!  Surprise yourself!  Enjoy the little things because one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things!

Barbara Johnson

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My wife and I just took two days off to go camping.  No work, no website, no computers–just us and nature and a few games like Scrabble to play.  We wanted to get away from everything for a very short time, and that’s what we did.  It was a beautiful reminder of just how important it can be to have a couple of days with nothing to do but wake up, go for walks, eat, take naps, and simply rest.

We rest a lot at home, but we also find that there’s always something to do at home.  Something needs to be washed or cleaned or arranged or put away or answered. . . . you can be sure that a day spent at home usually will be frittered away with tasks.  We found that while we were camping, we had time to play those games, and we had time to read books, and we had time to sit and talk, because there was nothing else making demands on our time.  No checking email, no phones to answer, no dishes to wash.  By the end of the second day I was completely relaxed, and I slept that night more deeply than I’ve slept in quite a long while.

When was the last time that you were able to pull yourself away from all of the demands of everyday life and just relax?  I’m not talking about long vacations, because those tend to be just as stressful as our daily routines, with all the arrangements that have to be made and places we have to be.  I’m talking about putting yourself in a situation in which you can relax completely because you know there will be no demands on your time or person, and in which you can do whatever you please without worrying about whether you’re being productive or “making good use” of your time.

I found out once more–reminded myself, to be more accurate–just how important it is to have nothing to do sometimes.  The human body and mind need to rest, and the rest needs to be true if it’s to have its desired effect.  The only thing that I realized that isn’t so positive is just how rarely I do take the time to do nothing.  I think that in the future, there’s going to be a lot more nothing in my life–it’s very healthy for me, and it will keep me more refreshed and ready for challenges.  This kind of rest makes me more able to help others, for when I have this rest, I’m much more effective in all that I do.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a
summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching
the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.

Sir John Lubbock

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 I heard a beautiful song today, another one of those songs that I’ve had on my computer for well over a year, but just never really listened to.  It’s by Alison Krauss, and it’s called “Simple Love.”  The beautiful part of the song for me is the chorus, when she sings “I want a simple love like that/Always giving never asking back/When I’m in my final hour looking back/I hope I had a simple love like that.”  It’s a song about her grandfather and the simple love that he gave to his family.

I don’t think that I could ask for any more in my life than reaching my final hour and looking back and seeing that I had a simple love that was always giving to others.  I don’t think that I could think of anything more gratifying at the end of my life than realizing that I had spent time giving love to others and not expecting anything in return.  I don’t do that now–at least not nearly as much as I’d like to be able to–but I do know that I have the potential to do so.  And someday I do hope to reach a point at which I’m living such a simple love.  My life and my self will be defined by the simple love that I’m living.

I love it when I discover songs like this one.  They help me to stay focused on the positive side of life, on the things that I can pursue to make my life more fulfilling and more amazing.  When I keep lyrics like this in my mind–and it’s easier for me to keep lyrics in mind than it is to keep simple words without music–then I can make decisions based on those words.  Tomorrow when I’m facing a troubling situation for example, which path would truly be showing simple love?  It frustrates me that it often takes me a long time to notice the value in such songs, but I have to figure that I’ll notice it when I’m ready to notice it.

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I’ve always had an interesting relationship with faith.  As I grew up, I saw very little evidence that faith ever was rewarded; because I never saw returns on faith, it didn’t make much sense to me.  My faith was stuck in a Catch-22:  unless I experienced the fact that faith actually “worked,” it was impossible for me to have faith; until I had faith, I’d never see the return on it.  It was a pretty frustrating position to be in for someone who strongly desired to have a deep faith.  Of course, the stories from some of the religious teachers around didn’t help–just have faith, and everything you want and desire will be yours.  Those of us who didn’t have a strong faith–through no fault of our own–obviously were excluded from having everything we wanted and desired.  It’s a pretty vicious circle that most religious people paint for us.

Fortunately, though, I’ve come to learn that faith isn’t about results.  Faith is, rather, about peace of mind and peace of heart.  Faith is about trusting God and life to know what is best and to do what is best, and even the doubts that I sometimes have cannot change the loving nature of God as I’ve been told it would.  After all, aren’t we generally punished for a lack of faith, according to many?  I’ve never understood why God would want to punish me for my thoughts, when it was him that gave me the brain that’s capable of such thoughts in the first place.

Your doubts are what help you to learn and to grow.  People having doubts is one of the greatest causes of change on the planet.  People doubt that that’s the fastest we can go, that the way we’re doing something now is the best way, that we’ve exhausted all our possibilities for new ways to do something.  Our doubts cause us to re-evaluate, to re-think, to reconsider.  And very often those reconsiderations lead us to an even stronger belief in our original stance.  We don’t always change our minds just because we doubt–sometimes we reinforce our convictions.

You doubting God or your faith or the goodness of humans or the possibilities for the future isn’t going to change any of those things.  But the reflection that your doubt causes you to go through can help you to change yourself and your own mind, and when all is said and done, isn’t that what we want to be open to all the time, anyway?  After all, a mind and a heart closed off to change and growth really are a lifeless mind and heart, aren’t they?

It need not discourage us if we are full of doubts.  Healthy questions keep faith dynamic. In fact, unless we start with doubts we cannot have a deep-rooted faith.  One who believes lightly and unthinkingly has not much of a belief. One who has a faith which is not to be shaken has won it through blood and tears–has worked his or her way from doubt to truth as one who reaches a clearing through a thicket of brambles and thorns.

Helen Keller

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My wife and I went for a walk today around a beautiful mountain lake.  It was a great day–the weather was warm, the sky and the water were brilliant shades of blue, we had a nice breeze, the smell of the pines was almost intoxicating–everything was perfect.  The only thing that seemed out of place was the fact that we had never been on a walk at this beautiful place before, even though it’s only about fifteen minutes from where we live.  We’ve lived here for almost ten months now, and even though we had been to the lake once before, we never had taken the time to get out of the car and spend some quality time there.

Whenever something like this happens, it gets me to wondering just how many other beautiful places are nearby.  How many places are within a quick drive from where we live?  There’s so much beauty in the world, and so much of it is so close to us already, yet we so rarely take the opportunity to go out and actually see it and enjoy it.  Sometimes we don’t even make the effort to find it in the first place!

Now, my wife and I do explore–we’ve seen plenty of other beautiful places in our area.  And we both work quite a lot, with relatively few days off together, so we don’t exactly have every waking moment to explore.  But if we do want to get the most out of where we live, it’s important that we find out just what we have to take advantage of in our own back yard!  I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t have some beautiful places within walking distance, or at least a short drive or bus ride away.  It’s so easy for us to accept what we know as the limits of our potential experiences, and when we do this, we close the door on the possibility of discovering new and beautiful places that can help us to get more out of the days that we pass on this planet.  Today we watched a bald eagle soar and we felt a cool breeze while we gazed upon a beautiful lake, and our day was exceptional because of it.  Then we stopped at a charming restaurant that overlooks the lake and had coffee and cake.  All in all, it was a beautiful experience.  And all this time, all this was just ten or fifteen minutes away.

It gets me to wondering what might be twenty or thirty minutes away in another direction.

Just what might be fifteen minutes away from you that may add significantly to your life?  I’ll bet if you were to do some exploring, you just might find something quite special. . . .

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I just read that two athletes that are hugely successful and currently ranked number one in their respective sports–Annika Sorenstam and Justine Henin–have called it quits, and will be moving on to do other things with their lives.  It’s extremely refreshing to see people in their position step back and even consider the idea that there may be more rewarding things for them to do with their lives than compete and try to hold on to their rankings.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with competing in athletics on a professional level.  It’s probably a very rewarding way to make a living.  But there’s also nothing wrong with re-examining your motives and your life in an effort to determine whether or not such competition is still fulfilling, still rewarding.  There’s a lot of money involved in the sports, but there are also many things that we can do that are more fulfilling in our hearts and spirits.

Their motives aren’t important to us because they’re their motives.  We don’t live their lives, so we don’t know what they were thinking and what kinds of needs they have.  The simple fact is that they’re sending a message to many people, especially their fans, that there may be more to life than the “success” that’s found in athletic victories and rankings and in the money that one earns in sports.  Perhaps there are things like family and friendship and fulfillment in one’s career that are more important than the incessant traveling and competing that define the lives of professional athletes on tour.

It’s refreshing to see two people decide to take a risk and change their courses in life.  I sincerely hope that they find fulfillment and joy in their new callings, and I’m grateful to them for showing us that simple monetary and athletic success aren’t necessarily the most important things in life, no matter how much people may idolize them and their performances.  I hope that they’re able to find peace and balance in their new lives, and I thank them for the moves they’ve made!

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