Are You Willing to Do This for One Day?

Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and the desires of little children; to remember the weakness and loneliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you and ask yourself whether you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to try to understand what those who live in the same house with you really want, without waiting for them to tell you; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front of you so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open - are you willing to do these things for even a day? 

—Caroline Kennedy, Author/Attorney

Bliss is not normal

"Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just like people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is just like an old time rail journey ... delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride." — Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Unitarian Minister (1843-1918)

The heart lies and the head plays tricks

"The heart lies and the head plays tricks on us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in a way knowing the truth." ~ George R.R. Martin, Novelist/Screenwriter

Book Review: The Shadow Effect

The quest for perfection is failed from the start for all of us. There is no perfect life. All of us are a mixture of all that we have experienced, all that has traumatized or hurt us, all that has informed us, all that has inspired and healed us. Our growing up years. Our college days. Our career or work choices. Our marriages and divorces. Our parents, lovers, and friends. It's all a part of who we have become and who we are now.

The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your Self, written by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford, and Marianne Williamson, is a fascinating book that explores all we have been, are now, and can still become once we understand and accept our own hidden power under the layers of all that we are.

Read a review of the book here: The Shadow Effect

When Life Hands a Hammer Blow

"Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie." ~ Dean Koontz, Novelist

The Good Life - It's Not What You Think

"I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming." ~ Carl Rogers, Psychologist

True strength is not about force

How do we make strong choices in life? How do we pull from inside us resources to do the hard things, the best things, the good things? It requires inner strength. Here are some brief, excellent thoughts about how we do this: Strength by Kent Nerburn