· Quotes of the week
· Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. ~John Adams
· The events of life are mainly small events - they only seem large when we are close to them. ~Mark Twain
· I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. ~George Washington
· Do, or do not. There is no "try."
--Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back
--Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back
· Meditation of the week
I find it awfully hard to give myself a break. I don't know where that attitude comes from.
--Walker I.
"I can't. I shouldn't. It's my fault." These self-abasing and self-defeating thoughts are expressions of shame. Because repeated thoughts turn into beliefs and long-held beliefs turn into actions, thoughts rooted in shame can lead to tragedy.
People who live in shame come to believe that it is not okay to make a mistake. They imagine they should know what to do without having to learn it. They think their wrong judgments mean they themselves are wrong.
But it is human to make mistakes. If we acknowledge we are human, we are defining ourselves as people who always have something to learn (Thomas Edison failed to perfect the light bulb until his ten-thousandth try). We are saying we have to keep going if our plans don't work out right away (Walt Disney went bankrupt seven times before he met with success).
"Thou shalt not be human" is the command of shame. What rubbish! How can we be anything else? Why would we want to be?
I pray I will live comfortably with human limitations. I will try to accept from myself what I accept from others.
You are reading from the book:
· Poem of the Week
The Death Deal
Ever since that moment
when it first occurred
to me that I would die
(like everyone on earth!)
I struggled against
this eventuality, but
never thought of
how I'd die, exactly,
until around thirty
I made a mental list:
hit by car, shot
in head by random ricochet,
crushed beneath boulder,
victim of gas explosion,
head banged hard
in fall from ladder,
vaporized in plane crash,
dwindling away with cancer,
and so on. I tried to think
of which I'd take
if given the choice,
and came up time
and again with He died
in his sleep.
Now that I'm officially old,
though deep inside not
old officially or otherwise,
I'm oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.
when it first occurred
to me that I would die
(like everyone on earth!)
I struggled against
this eventuality, but
never thought of
how I'd die, exactly,
until around thirty
I made a mental list:
hit by car, shot
in head by random ricochet,
crushed beneath boulder,
victim of gas explosion,
head banged hard
in fall from ladder,
vaporized in plane crash,
dwindling away with cancer,
and so on. I tried to think
of which I'd take
if given the choice,
and came up time
and again with He died
in his sleep.
Now that I'm officially old,
though deep inside not
old officially or otherwise,
I'm oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.
