Zorba the Greek was said to have described himself as “the whole catastrophe.” The truth is, we’re all the whole catastrophe, only we wish that we weren’t. We deny the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable rather than accepting the fact that we’re all less than perfect. One of the reasons it’s important to accept all aspects of yourself is that it allows you to be easier on yourself, more compassionate. When you act or feel insecure, rather than pretending to be “together” you can be open to the truth and say to yourself, “I’m feeling frightened and that’s okay.” If you’re feeling a little jealous, greedy, or angry, rather than deny or bury your feelings, you can open to them, which helps you move through them quickly and grow beyond them.
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Harry Chapin – Greyhound
I should have realized by now
that all my life's a ride.
It's time to find some happy times
and make myself some friends
I know there ain't no rainbows waiting
when this journey ends.
Stepping off this dirty bus
first time I understood
It's got to be the going
not the getting there that's good
That's a thought for keeping if I could.
It's got to be the going
not the getting there that's good.
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H. Scott Peck – The Road Less Traveled
Life is difficult. The first of the “Four Noble Truths” which Buddha taught was “life is suffering”. This is a great truth, one or the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one. Problems call forth our courage and wisdom; indeed they create our courage and our wisdom. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems. Ben Franklin said, “Those things that hurt instruct.” Wise people learn to welcome problems. Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved most of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, ignore, forget, pretend they do not exist, we even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that caused the pain. We attempt to get out of them rather than suffer through them. Let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and experience the pain involved. What are the tools/techniques of suffering that I call discipline?
- Delaying gratification
- Acceptance of responsibility
- Dedication to truth
- Balancing
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Timbuk3 – Greetings From
Life is hard
Can't buy happiness no matter what you do
Can't get to heaven on roller skates
Can't take a taxicab to Timbuktu
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Thich Nhat Hanh – Peace Is Every Step
Real love. We have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we think only of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.
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Stephen Covey – Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (A Quick Overview)
- Be proactive – Take a Breath between stimulus and response
- Begin with the end in mind – Planning ahead doesn’t eliminate spontaneity.
- Put first things first – Relationships are our most important things.
- Think win win – Even though you may not always be able to
- Seek first to understand and then to be understood – Listen to learn not to reply
- Synergize – Be part of the orchestra (solo on your own time)
- Sharpen the saw – Do things that enhance your mind, your body, your spirit and your relationships.
View life as a spiral of continuing upward growth.
Occasionally you will slide back.
Be good to yourself.
Move onward and upward.
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Mary Catherine Bateson - Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way
Virtually all the learning that precedes schooling—walking, talking, bye-bye and peekaboo, the intricate rhythms of life within a household—is learning as homecoming. It proceeds at dazzling speed compared with school learning, yet it is underestimated nearly everywhere. Infants have visible states of intense alertness from their earliest weeks.
Building model planes, ballet dancing, riding, computer hacking, basketball playing, working on a novel in secret, any of these, whether or not it promises a way of making a living later in life, can become a standard for feeling fully alive.
When school begins much of this invisible learning is negative: the inadequacy of parents as sources, the irrelevance of play, the unacceptability of imagination. School teaches the contextualization of learning and the importance of keeping different areas of life separate: home from the workplace, Sundays from weekdays, and work from play.
Teaching children that there is a correct time and place for learning, we also teach them to stop learning when the manage to escape from school, or to keep what has been learned specialized to one context and quite inaccessible for use in others.
The informal learning, unverbalized and unquestioned, takes precedence over explicit teaching unless uprooted in drastic ways.
It is fashionable in America to say that schools are failing and there is a groundswell of anger against educators of all kinds. This is not in the main because they are not doing their job, it is because we have no adequate understanding of what that job is in the kind of society we are becoming.
The avalanche of changes taking place around the world, the changes we should be facing at home, all come as reminders that of all the skills learned in school the most important is the skill to learn over a lifetime those things that no one, including the teachers, yet understands.
You will always be acting under uncertainty. You will know the future when you get there. Only so can you make it your home.
The world we live in is the one we are able to perceive; it becomes gradually more intelligible and more accessible with the building up of coherent mental models. Learning to know a community or a landscape is a homecoming. Creating a vision of that community or landscape is homecoming.
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Fritjof Capra – The Web of Life
Information is presented as the basis of thinking, whereas in reality the human mind thinks with ideas, not with information.
As Theodore Roszak shows in The Cult of Information, information does not create ideas; ideas create information. Ideas are integrating patterns that derive not from information but from experience.
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From a story by Victor Frankl about Auschwitz…a young women who would die in the next few days… But when I talked to her she was cheerful. She mentions, “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.”…”this tree is the only friend I have in my loneliness”….”I often talk to this tree” Thinking she must be delirious I asked her if the tree replied? “Yes”. What does it say?
“I am here – I am life, eternal life.”
tree=life
Both Frankl and the young woman reach new awareness through painful confusion followed by perception of wholeness and form. Both reached awareness through an emotional torment, honestly and bravely suffered, that gave way to transcendent fulfillment. The basis of this fulfillment was a single metaphor,
tree=life.
