Peace Like a River.

Peace. Tranquillity. Equanimity. Unperturbedness. Zen Calm.

We can picture it by imagining the surface of a pond on a windless day. No ripples. No movement.

But then, a famous Christian hymn features the interesting phrase, "Peace like a river." And that's surprising. A river isn't still. It moves. It flows.

When I hear the word 'river,' I immediately see in my mind's eye a wide expanse, big rocks, and hugely turbulent rapids throwing white spray high into the air, and a large raft of unsuspecting tourists screaming for their lives as they're tossed around like a toy, while the fast current takes them toward a quickly approaching abyss, a massive waterfall they'll never survive ... Ok, maybe I've watched too many action movies. I admit it. I can even see the helicopter swooping down to pluck the desperate people from their doom. Peace like a river? No, I'm sorry.

So why do we have that phrase?

Calm water can soon become stagnant. Moving water is always renewed. And that's the key to this image. I live near a big river, the only large river in North Carolina that empties directly into the ocean. There aren't any rapids in sight. There's a calm flow forward. And that's what matters here. A river brings fresh waters, constantly. A river is ever-renewing. A river flows through any point along it. It nurtures and feeds all life along it.

What we want in our lives is renewable peace, a flow of inner tranquillity that will nurture us, no matter what's going on. We need an ever fresh source of inner flow that can't be stopped by worry, anxiety, anger, or fear. The old hymn says, "I've got peace like a river in my soul." So it's possible to get that. And here's my advice during this holiday season. If you have this sort of peace within you, then savor it. If you don't, then seek it. And when you find it, then share it.

Trust the Process

Every effort toward something important, every quest, every goal-centered pursuit, is a process. And one of the toughest challenges in life is to trust the process as it unfolds.

Good things rarely happen as quickly or as easily as we'd like. Time passes. The horizon recedes. We begin to wonder. Certainly fades into maybe. And our confidence lags, along with other emotions. We're tempted to jump ship, give up, and go on our way.

But this is so common a scenario that we ought to recognize it as such, and approach it differently. Delay is natural in the world. The timing we want is not often the timing we get. So patience is needed, but even more so, trust. We need trust. We need faith. 

There's an old adage (Ok, it's my old adage): Plan your work, and then work your plan. Every good plan needs an investment of trust, of commitment, of hope and realistic optimism.

Then, when the time has fully come, things happen. When the time is right, the process comes to culmination, to fruition, to completion. Would you want it sooner than when the time is right?

If you've chosen the process, if you picked it because you believed in this way of working, then one thing only remains. Trust the process.

Today.

What Makes Your Life Feel Rich?

On Thursday, November 20, 2014, a great teacher left this life. David Menasche had taught eleventh graders at Coral Reef High School in Miami for 16 years. In 2006, at the age of 34, he was diagnosed with a fatal form of brain cancer and told he had months to live. But he fought on for 8 more years. 

Right after the diagnosis, he returned to the classroom, which he called his “sanctuary,” and told his students that he wanted to spend the time he had left with them. Early this year, he explained his choice to continue to teach by saying:

For me, teaching wasn't about making a living. It was my life.

Nothing made me happier or more content than standing in front of a classroom and sharing the works of writers such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jack Kerouac, Tupac Shakur and Gwendolyn Brooks and watching my students "catch" my passion for language and literature.

I loved watching these 15- and 16-year-olds grapple with their first major life decisions -- future careers, relationships, where to live, which colleges to attend, what to study-- at the same moment they're learning to drive and getting their first jobs and experimenting with identity and independence.

No matter how sick he felt, he was in the classroom. He was in these kids’ lives. But in 2012, he had a major stroke, or catastrophic seizure that left him partly crippled and mostly blind. He had to retire from the work he loved. But he didn’t have to abandon his students. In fact, he hatched a plan to visit former students around the country, to see what, if any, impact his work had effected in their lives. He announced his plan on Facebook and immediately had 50 invitations within 48 hours. He ended up traveling more than 8,000 miles to visit hundreds of his former students. And they shared with him their memories from class. His teaching had mattered. It had touched their lives. But most of all, they remembered the personal conversations they had shared with him while in school. He wrote,

As I had hoped, they recalled favorite lessons and books from class, but, to my great surprise, it was our personal time together that seemed to have meant the most to them. Those brief, intimate interludes between lessons when we shared heartaches and vulnerabilities and victories were the times my students remembered. And it was through them I realized that those very human moments, when we connected on a deep and personal level, were what made my life feel so rich, then and now. My students had taught me the greatest lesson of all. They taught me that what matters is not so much about what we learn in class, but what we feel in our hearts.

David wrote a book full of the lessons he learned and taught along the way. It’s called The Priority List: A Teacher’s Final Quest to Discover Life’s Greatest Lessons. It will be soon made into a movie, and Steve Carell will play the teacher who cared so much.

In this Thanksgiving Season, I urge you to think about what makes your life feel rich, and to cultivate more of those moments. Teacher David Menasche learned that it’s all about the very human moments we share and that can resonate for years. His realizations are confirmed and deeply reflected in another book just published by one of my good friends, Matt Hamm. Matt’s book is entitled Redefine Rich, and is available early in a special first release edition through his website, www.MattHam.com. Go check it out. Read. Reflect. And perhaps, this holiday season can be one in which you deepen your life with the things that matter the most, the priorities that will make you feel richer than ever.

Thankfulness and Thanksgiving

Thankfulness is a perception, and then an attitude, and then an emotion. It’s first a form of awareness, or recognition, and then a sense of appreciation. It's a deep and layered thing. Thanksgiving is the act of expressing that inner recognition and gratitude.

We’re surrounded by blessings all the time, things to be recognized as such, and appreciated. At its best, thankfulness is a joyous response of gratitude to these things. It's a recognition of goodness that then makes more goodness possible. So it’s not just responsive, it’s also creative. Let me say that again, and with feeling.

Thankfulness is not just responsive. It's also creative.

In fact, it could be that thankfulness is the most deeply hidden source for creative love, and loving creativity that exists.

What do you have to be thankful for today? How many blessings do you enjoy?

Conscious life itself is the primal blessing - a metaphysically rare and wondrous thing. We had no claim on this life prior to existing. It's the ultimate product of grace.

Be thankful, then, for your life, whatever it may look like at present, for it is always a journey in transition and motion that makes possible great things yet to come. 

Be thankful for your blessings. They help you to experience the nurturing side of love. 

Be thankful for your trials. They help you to experience the challenging side of love.

Both blessings and trials can be doorways into a fuller life, if used properly.

And that just means that even our trials can end up being blessings.

Thankfulness can be spontaneous, or it can be a choice. Either way, it will enhance your life, and your day. It will also touch those around you.

If you don't feel it naturally welling up in you each day, choose to embody it. Choose that way forward. It alone creates the best.

Joy

Joy. It's a big concept bottled up in a little word. It's a big thing available to each of us.

One of the major surprises I had when I was studying the stoic philosophers, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, years ago, in preparation for my book The Stoic Art of Living, was that they were so different from what 'stoic' and 'stoicism' has come to mean in the popular mind. Most people think that being stoic is all about not feeling anything - that it's almost like philosophical anesthesia. But it's not.

The stoics wanted to help us to keep from being disturbed by fleeting emotions so that our natural joy could rise to the surface and be experienced and lived. Negative emotions like resentment, and bitterness, and anger can obviously prevent an experience of joy. But the additional insight of the stoics was that unreasonably strong positive emotions could, too, like that "irrational exuberance" that can come from hearing what we think is great good news. When we get too worried, or too excited, we can become unhinged from reality and our own inner poise and healthiness. The stoics seemed to think that if we could avoid such unsettling emotions, negative or positive, we could become peaceful enough in our surface consciousness as to allow a deep joy that is our birthright to bubble up into our souls and truly bless us.

Joy is not the same thing as happiness. It's not giddiness. It's not mere pleasantness. It's deeper and higher and more abiding. Most of us have felt it, at some time, if only in a momentarily taste or touch of it. But some seem to live it enduringly. Do you have it in your life right now? If not, why not? What's getting in the way? What obstacle to your joy could be removed or eliminated?

At its best, therapy removes obstacles to joy. At its best, self examination prepares the soil for joy.

What gives you joy? Can you integrate more of that into your life this week? Or even today?

It's meant to be yours. And it can enhance everything else you feel, and do.

Inner Conditions for Knowing

Some people will just never understand you, no matter how hard you try to make yourself known.

There are personal conditions, requirements, preliminaries, for understanding and knowing. And, conversely, there are inner obstacles to both. On one level, this is obvious. There are things that little children can't know or understand. We can teach a four year old to say, "Business can't be about just profit maximization." But she won't really know or understand what she's saying. Likewise for "Mommy's a comptroller."

What we often forget is that we've come across here a universal truth. Throughout life, there are conditions for knowing. Not everything can be gotten from a book, or the internet, or an app. If you've never been to Manhattan, or Helsinki, you can't really know those places. You can read about them and gather endless facts. But there is a different sort of knowledge that only being there confers. At a certain level, you can understand a lot about tennis or golf through just reading enough books and watching the sport played. But there is a form of knowledge you don't have unless you've played a lot. There's other knowledge you can access unless you've played really well. The top pros understand the game in a way that weekend amateurs can't.

I'm convinced that there are also spiritual or moral conditions for knowing. We interpret the world, in part, through who we already are. A thoroughly selfish person can't recognize and know real altruism when it's staring him in the face. A person suspecting enemies and jealous detractors everywhere finds it nearly impossible to experience real friendship. An angry person sees life through a different lens than the one used by a happy person.

At different stages, and in different conditions, we have access to different things about the world. Technology will never provide universal access to all truth, no matter how much can be encoded. Our own growth will give us a form of access that can't be replicated in any other way.

So, we should remember that growth brings access. There are plateaus in life, and we can easily forget that, no matter where we are now, in our own inner lives and personal accomplishments, further growth is awaiting us, and it will bring greater knowledge and understanding. We shouldn't expect to have it all figured out already. There are endless adventures that await us.

So: Think growth today. And seek to develop, however slightly, the inner conditions for new understanding. Expand your existential territory. That's a good part of why you're here.

The Road to Greatness

This week, I've written an earlier blog post on the idea of greatness. A friend read it and told me something interesting. He said that his son had once been at a school where he was surrounded by mediocrity, and then switched to another school in the same town where he encountered the quest for personal greatness, left and right. My friend went on to say that the new, more challenging environment, had a decidedly uplifting effect on his son, right away, and that the results of this got him into a top university, where the level of expected excellence increased again. 

It's amazing how often we've been told by philosophers that we become like the people we're around, and how commonly we forget to use this important truth to our own advantage. During my years at Notre Dame, it astonished me to see that, no matter how good our football team might be, when they played a bad team, they played badly themselves. The sloppiness and mistakes they showed could be truly perplexing to witness. And yet, when they played a top five team, they'd play them toe-to-toe, and often win.

We're so often like thermometers, rising or falling with the temperature around us, and yet we'd prefer to think of ourselves as thermostats, determining it, instead.

There are a lot of deep evolutionary reasons, related to survival, for our unconscious need and drive to fit in with the people around us. We need to be accepted. We need to be liked. And so, below the level of awareness, we conform in many ways. We become like our tribe.

But we also have the gift of free will. And that allows the possibility, within limits, and sometimes even apart from any limits, for us to choose our tribe. Who do we want to hang around? Who do we want to be like? Who do we most admire?

And yet, here's the apparent dilemma: I want to be like people who are a lot better than me. That way, I can grow into my own form of greatness, encouraged by my environment. But if they're at least as smart and ambitious as I am, they'll want to be around people much better than them, which clearly excludes me. Remember Groucho Marx, who said he'd never want to belong to a club that would have someone like him as a member? That's sort of the problem.

But there's the secret. If I want to be around people significantly better than I am in all the right ways, they will be people of great kindness and curiosity - two very different virtues. And yet, either of those qualities will open them up to my company. Problem solved.

So, why not aim for the stars? The real stars, I mean, not the fake, manufactured ones. When we associate with people of real wisdom and virtue, real accomplishment and knowledge, we're encouraged in our own adventures with greatness. The path is much easier.

Why, then, should we ever settle for less?

Kindness

Kindness is something that, in small doses, can have big results.

Harshness is something that, in a glancing blow, can do great damage.

Full attention is a tremendous gift that we can give another person.

Inattention and indifference wound us deeply.

We were born to care, and to need care.

We should cultivate caring connections whenever we can.

The more we give, the more we get.

But we all know that. Yet, we often forget.

Every life is a doorway into the mysteries and depths of existence.

Every person bears witness to something vital.

When we treasure people more, when we live with kindness, we flourish.

Greatness

Do you aspire to greatness? Or does that question just strike you as silly, or almost embarrassing? 

One of my favorite books in the late '80s was Attaining Personal Greatness, by Melanie Brown. It's actually one of my favorite success and personal growth books of all time, and I bet you haven't heard of it. That's too often the way things go. It's great (appropriately) but not well known. You can buy it on Amazon now for a penny. I quickly learned not to carry it around with the title showing, lest I elicit comments like "Oh. Have you attained it yet?" Or, "How's that going?" (with a raised eyebrows and a finger pointing toward the title).

Can you even imagine the concept broached in a speed dating situation: "What are your interests and plans?" - "Well, greatness. I'd like to attain personal greatness." - "Ok. NEXT!"

I did a podcast interview yesterday with a great guy who seems to be a real kindred spirit, Jay Forte, author of the book The Greatness Zone, and proprietor of the website named, appropriately, The Greatness Zone. He said that when he told his kids about the book, they advised him that he desperately needed a different title - that nobody is going to go around googling "greatness," or even binging it, or Yahooing, or whatever.

But I did. A quick google of the word 'greatness' reveals that it got used a lot in the year 1800, but that since then, it's been on a long downhill decline, which has only recently begun to reverse. The word 'awesome' by contrast had almost no usage in 1800, but experienced a marked increase of usage beginning after 1900, and spiking in the 1990s, until relatively recently, when it slowly began to become "not so great, or awesome, after all."

Our word 'great' has an interesting ancestry. In Old English, it was pronounced like "Greet." In Dutch, the root was 'groot.'  In German, 'gross' - but we'll pass over that one. In Old Saxon, it was 'grot', meaning, of course, something very different from 'rot'. These terms each tended to imply "big" or "tall" or "thick" or "stout." They were words of distinctive magnitude. In Middle English, there was a related verb, greaten, that meant "to grow, to increase, to become larger, or develop." And that's a key to the modern meaning.

Greatness is the result of a proper development, or appropriate growth, far beyond the norm. We speak of great musicians, great painters, great leaders, a great product, great service, and great art. The great is the wonderful and rare, the exceptional, the extraordinary that's far beyond the range of the ordinary. Now, there is certainly nothing wrong with what's ordinary, except when that word far too often comes to mean mediocre, subpar, poor, or even not really that good.

Nobody's born wanting to be a failure. Few people aspire to mediocrity. But is it Ok to shoot beyond good? Is it fine, or even commendable, or rather, obnoxiously elitist, and even narcissistic, to strive for greatness?

I happen to think that, in life and in the many roles we play within it, greatness is first and foremost a spiritual condition, an expansion of skill, ability, and performance that involves bringing something or someone to a special form of heightened completeness. It arises from innate gifts but develops through passion and persistence and a refusal to be stopped short of what's possible. Greatness is an achievement and pinnacle concept. And it's a realizable ideal.

Greatness isn't the same thing as perfection. Great men and women often have great flaws, or imperfections. But greatness requires the ability to learn from mistakes and challenges and failures along the way. And its measure is context relative. A great hotdog doesn't have to compete with a great painting in the realm of the aesthetic. Great work in college may be judged differently from great work in a professional context at the apex of an industry, or discipline. 

Perhaps, we can each aspire to our own personal form of greatness, at any given time, dependent on our talents, interests, values, and opportunities. Your proper greatness now, or in ten years, need not get you on the cover of Time Magazine, or invited to a sit-down with Oprah. But it will ennoble and elevate you and those around you, when it's done right. And it could even be what you're here for.

Just be careful how you talk about it, if you're first aspiring to it, or well on your way.

Who Will Cry When You're Gone?

Who will cry when they first learn you're gone?

Ok, I don't want to be the philosophical version of Debbie Downer here, but we need a second day on the topic of death, I think, but only obliquely, and as the source of a question. Yesterday, I mentioned an announcement in church of a great man's impending departure. Immediately, tissues and hankies were visible all over the sanctuary, as people dabbed their eyes. And that caused me to reflect on a very sad fact. There are top leaders in the world of business who seemed to have nothing more than an acquaintance relationship to their own family members. Their time is always spent elsewhere, and their energy. And at work, they're all business. They don't go around touching the hearts of others.

The people who will cry when they first learn that you're gone will be the people whose hearts you've touched with kindness and love, with affection and concern, with support and encouragement. How many are there? That, to me, is a measure of a life well lived. And we don't all measure up as we would like. But as long as we're still here, we can do something about it.

I think it's interesting to use what I like to call "The Inner Circle Principle." Your life can be imagined as contained within concentric circles. Family and best friends are the closest, innermost circle. Then, there are increasingly remote orbs of friends, co workers, neighbors and other acquaintances who also surround you. Ideally, you should be touching people's hearts in every contact you have. They deserve that. And so do you. But as a practical matter, it can help to concentrate first on the inner circle of people in your life - family and close friends. Are you acting toward them with kindness and love, affection and concern, support and encouragement? Are you paying attention, and doing the little things that will help them and touch their hearts? Or are you always in a hurry, distracted, and needed elsewhere for "important things"? These are the important things.

Give people what they most deeply need while you're here, and you'll make them wish you would stay on and on. And then, when they do learn that you've left for a distant shore, some tissues and hankies will likely appear to signal the good memories that you've left in their hearts.

Burn Bright While You're Here

In our informal Methodist church at the beach yesterday, the head minister told us at the start of the service that the oldest member of our ministerial staff had just suffered a major stroke and was now with hospice for what would most likely be his final hours. This man, The Reverend P. D. Midget, though in his nineties, had always seemed to have a timeless youth and vigor about him. Today, I realized that I had always assumed he'd be with us for a lot longer, despite his advanced age. He was a great harmonica player, and could do a fine job as well on the mandolin or banjo. He had recently had a smaller stroke, and in rehab had written and performed an upbeat song about it all that amazed everyone at the hospital. A graduate of Duke Divinity School, long ago, he was a keen reader and thinker, and could reenact episodes from the lives of historical figures in a dramatic way that was unexpectedly moving. He was an unusually kind and loving man, and always had a quick smile and a word of encouragement for anyone who crossed his path. I really enjoyed every conversation I had ever had with him, and now wish there had been a lot more of them.

In giving the announcement concerning this unexpected turn of events, our minister mentioned that he had already overseen the funerals of eight people in the past eleven days. And for a church of our size, that's pretty unusual. This two facts together were a powerful reminder of the fleeting nature of our time in this world, which is something that we usually keep out of mind. But it can be greatly useful to remember. As Woody Allen's character, in one of his movies long ago, said to a friend: "Don't you realize what a thread we're all hanging by?"

Consider an interesting passage from Ernest Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises. 

Just eleven pages into it, you'll come across this brief conversation that starts with Robert Cohn, Princeton graduate and amateur boxer, speaking to his old friend Jake, the narrator, in a bar - where it seems, interestingly, that philosophizing about life often takes place:

"Listen, Jake," he leaned forward on the bar.  "Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it?  Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?"

"Yes, every once in a while."

"Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we'll be dead?"

"What the hell, Robert,' I said, "What the hell?"

"I'm serious."

"It's one thing I don't worry about," I said.

"You ought to."

As we all know, but mostly, like Jake, tend not to think about very much, life is a limited-time offer. This is an interesting point of reflection for all of us who are already in mid-life or beyond. But it's an important fact for any of us, however young or old. Are we making the most of our time on earth? Are we using our talents in the best ways, and taking advantage of the opportunities that come to us each day? Are we enjoying the adventure? Are we touching the lives of others in positive ways? Or are we letting ourselves be held back and worn down by our own inner reactions to things that are sometimes outside our control?

There's a lesson we can glean from Woody Allen, and Hemingway's characters, and my old friend. Burn bright while you're here. It won't be forever. Remember this, and make your best difference while you can.

Impact First, Then Income

My motto for my work has always been simple: 

Impact First, Then Income.

My primary concern is a positive impact. My secondary concern is a positive cash flow. And that matters, because the prioritization I try to maintain will suggest certain activities and discourage others. As a philosopher, writer, and speaker, I want to make a difference for other people, as well as myself, and my family. I want to put giving over receiving, spreading over gathering. Of course, finances matter. They matter a lot. But other things matter even more. And it's those other things that should be our ultimate guides.

But, I can almost hear a question, which is even, perhaps, a skeptical hesitation: Is this sort of perspective simply a luxury for the few - to think first about making a difference and only second about making a dollar? My answer is: No, I truly don't think so. No matter where we are in life or what we're facing, it's important to focus first on the contribution we're making, on the good we're doing. That's ultimately the best way to get help, or a job, or a promotion, or the big payday that most of us would like to see. But it's also right for its own sake. We're here to give more than we get, and to leave the world a little better than we found it.

I'm convinced that coming at the equation from the other end is always a mistake. Those who think first about making money and only second about making a difference will eventually encounter trouble in some form. And they'll risk not becoming the best they're capable of being.

Even if you work focally with money in a field like financial services, it's important to see beyond the the market and the monthly report. We all work with people. And that should fundamentally guide us. What's the real human benefit of your work? Is it everything it could be? is it what it should be? Will a certain decision enhance my impact, or only my income? Those are the questions we all need to ask. Money without meaning is empty.

How am I using my talents, my abilities, and my opportunities? What difference am I making for other people? Could I do more? Could I do better? Those are the fundamental issues. And then matters of finance can helpfully be raised. Income is necessary for most of us, and profit is good, if it fits properly into our overall lives and values.

Don't let the tail wag the dog. Put first things first. Focus on what you can do to bless and benefit those around you, and you'll see good come back to you in surprising ways.. 

A Royalty of the Spirit, Relevant to All

There are, among us, certain spiritual people who seem to be in touch with something more, something that lights them up and guides them and inspires them with love and compassion and wisdom, and even knowledge of an extraordinary sort. But it isn’t just a small group of spiritual adepts who have the ability to receive insight and guidance through meditative stillness and prayer, and an open heart of eager willingness. All of us represent a royalty of the spirit who have come into this exotically strange, terrible, and wonderful world with a birthright that we often don't acknowledge, understand, or assert. And yet, still, there are times when a man or a woman, or even, and perhaps more often, a boy or a girl, will be struck with a message from beyond the visible, tangible world of the senses, just out of the blue, and with no preparation or anticipation. It could be a word of encouragement, or direction, or even warning. When it occurs, it can seem to come from outside us, and yet at the same time, from deep within us.

This actually happens, I think, to all of us at some points in our earliest years, but we often later lose our memories of these experiences, because they’re not reinforced for us by the surrounding culture. We’re not encouraged to become all that we can be, in the full range of our capacities, or to do all that we can do. And so, some of our innate abilities, a crucial part of what I like to think of as our royal inheritance, will atrophy and grow weak over time. But they’ll never disappear. They can’t be utterly extinguished. That would mean the annihilation of the soul itself. And yet they can be hobbled and starved and buried under the debris of triviality and of those worldly pressures that we too often refer to as the practical demands of life – as if life has any demands greater and more practical than that we be the best of who we are. We too easily and commonly adapt ourselves to the lowest ways of the kingdom of this world, in patterns of activity and thought that are perhaps unproblematic in themselves, but only as long as they don’t eclipse what’s higher. And yet, we too often allow them to make us forget the royal palace of the spirit, and the aligned rights, duties, and priviledges that exist in connection with it, deep within us, even though it is they that most essentially define who we are.

Despite all this, those of us who do recognize and honor the realm of the spirit should never be too quick to divide the world between an elite group of higher functioning individuals, who seek to partake of everything within the spirit that’s available to us, and, on the other hand, the majority of humanity, who seem to live as self-imposed exiles from their own royalty, and act as if they are mere commoners of the spirit. There is, instead, a vast spectrum of openness and experience represented in the world. Truly spiritual, and remarkably advanced souls certainly exist, at one end of the sweep of human experience, with the most sadly dimmed and brutish personalities at the far end. An ordinary person, who’s never as ordinary as he or she might seem, to superficial and external appearances, is always capable of more depth and breadth than any casual acquaintance, colleague, or sometimes even a good friend, might expect.

There are depths behind depths, and layers beneath layers and, if we could only see all the people around us through eyes that know and remember this, the world would look so different to us, and more like it indeed most fundamentally is.

Anger. Grrrrr.

How often do you feel angry? I hope it's a rare experience. Aristotle taught us that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this emotion. It can be rational and appropriate, but only with the right reason, toward the right object, in the right measure, and for the right amount of time. Anger toward an injustice can rouse us to work to stop it. It can light our fuse and get us moving. But if it continues to burn, then we're going to be the ones incinerated by it.

Frequent anger is corrosive to the soul. It's a poison. And we need to understand it better in order to avoid it more.

Anger often arises from fear or frustration. When you feel it welling up in you, you should ask, "What am I afraid of here?" Or "What's frustrating me right now, and what can I do about it?"

If something's bothering you that you can change, then action is better than anger. If it's something you truly can't do anything about, then acceptance beats anger any day.

The more often you feel this emotion, the more you should analyze your fears and frustrations. If you can deal with them properly, then this inner disruption will not bother you so much, but rather, literally, leave you in peace.

And, ultimately, it's only from a state of inner peace that we can best face new challenges and situations that would otherwise spark in us fear or frustration.

When we deal properly with the inner causes of anger, the results can be grrrrrrreat!

Excellence

Long ago and far away, wise people knew what we need to keep in mind.

I was cleaning up my office today and found a bunch of old 3x5 note cards from decades ago, dating from my time at Notre Dame. On one yellowed card was this, which I thought might be worth sharing:

"Badness you can get easily, in quantity - the road is smooth, and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it, and rough at first. But when you come to the top, then it is easy, even though it is hard."

Hesiod. Around 700 BC.

The view from the top is amazing. But the air is so thin. And yet, the work of excellence is, at a point, easy as well as hard. It's just another of the wonderful paradoxes of life. You see as you climb.

Grace and Mercy

Grace is defined as unmerited favor. It involves giving others, and sometimes even lavishing on them, something they don't literally deserve or have a claim to receive. It means going beyond what could be expected, and acting from the boundless resource of love.

Mercy is typically defined as compassion, or forbearance. It involves not dishing out to others something negative or harshly judgmental that they might actually deserve. It involves a certain restraint, or a holding back, with a sense of another's intrinsic value, born only of love. Mercy finds a better way.

Grace and mercy. How often do we speak of such things? Really? And yet, they are surely among the most important things of all. Do we cultivate these amazing dispositions with our thoughts and actions, daily? Or do we merely admire them from afar and hope to be their beneficiaries, rather than dedicating ourselves to being their conduits into the world?

Go to a movie, turn on a TV, or sample what's happening online, in news comments, and social media, beyond your closest circle of friends. How much grace and mercy do you experience?

Too many of us are dipped into a toxic mix every day and then wonder why we don't shine.

Each of us is here, I believe, to be a blessing to others, and never a curse. How then do we manage that? By living with grace and mercy. Expose yourself to others who live this way. Read of these things. Think on them. Use your imagination well. Ask: "How can I be a vehicle for grace and mercy to others?" Avoid the poisonous brew spread abroad by those who are strangers to these concepts. And, in a famous twist on the golden rule, treat others as if they were what they ought to be, and you can help them become what they're capable of being.

That way, you'll be a blessing, and never a curse, to those around you, to our broader world, and perhaps, most important of all, to yourself.

So go live a little grace and mercy.

Today.

Life as Exploration and Discovery

"Life has its own hidden forces which you can discover only by living." Soren Kierkegaard.

Habit can be a subtle anesthetic. We need to wake up and shake it off.

Life is supposed to be a series of adventures - one big adventure, full of many smaller ones. Every day is meant to be a classroom for the spirit. Living well means learning every day.

Most people become content with surface living, caught up with appearances and fairly superficial routines. That's not supposed to be the way it goes. We've all been dropped into this strange mysterious world to be its explorers, its adventurers, and its collaborative creators. If we live the way we're meant to live, we discover those hidden forces Kierkegaard was alluding to, and we can then use them in powerful ways.

So, live adventurously. Discover what's hidden. And use it well.

Today.

Patience

"Patience is a virtue." Almost Everyone's Mother.

Why is patience a virtue, or strength? Well, let's think about what an impatient person does. He or she feels an inner tension, a stress, perhaps even a form of anxiety. He's agitated. She's frustrated. And often filled with questions: When? Why is it taking so long? How can I speed this up? What do I have to do to get this pot to boil, this person to answer me, this opportunity to gel, or to get this problem fixed? What? How? Why? When?

Meanwhile, the patient person is at peace. She's going with the flow. He's content with the pace of things, while still perhaps ambitious, and he's quietly confident in the future.

And these characteristics of patience are all good and desirable things, right?

So why is it so hard to be patient, and so easy to be the opposite?

And there's also a deeper question in the neighborhood, isn't there?

Maybe what I characterized above as the opposite of patience is really just one version, a subjective, boiling pot of emotions that creates nothing but inner pressure and discontent. Isn't there another cluster of responses available for the person who isn't just fine to wait? I have in mind, action, persistence, determination, creativity, and more action. And aren't those all good things, as well?

So here's the real question. When is it best to take action, or more action, in pursuit of your desires or dreams, and when is it best to wait patiently? It's never best to just stew with frustration. We can all agree to that. But when is patient waiting perhaps just not the thing you need, but action instead to create the near term future that you want.

The easy answer from 40,000 feet is that there's no general answer at all, except that knowing when to be patient and when to act requires wisdom, or genuine discernment. And that answer, while true, gives us no help here on the ground, day to day. Is there a better answer available?

Tune in tomorrow.

Yeah, be patient.

Today.

Making Little Plans

I got an email in my box just the other day with the big title, appropriately all in bold:

Make No Little Plans. Think Big.

And it struck me immediately how commonplace such a piece of advice is, nowadays.  A culture of hype, superlatives, and grandiosity has gradually developed around those of us interested in personal growth, self-improvement, success, and spiritual development. And in this culture, it's sometimes amazing what people will actually say with a straight face, or an enthusiastic one.

I'm convinced that the real truth in life is exciting enough. We don't need to cavort in fields of hyperbole and exaggeration in order to get psyched and excited about our genuine prospects in this world. Not everything has to be the equivalent of a high wire act over the Grand Canyon, or between buildings in Chicago. You don't have to become a billionaire, or change the face of the world. Sure, some people launch rockets. And some rockets explode. And not everybody should aim for outer space, in the first place.

Sometimes, it's good to make small plans. And maybe, the best thing you can do, in some situations, is to think small. And I'm not talking nanotech here. Because, in many circumstances, little things can make a crucial difference. Often, it's just the difference that's needed - in a relationship, in an office, at home, or with a client. Yes, we do live in a world of grand gestures and huge plans, with plenty of seminars, books and videos to tell us how to be gigantic, and enormously admired. But aren't we often touched and impressed with the little kindness, the small gesture, the tiny act of grace and love that might convey something deep and wonderful? And who's to say that small and quiet lives in this world can't capture the greatest spiritual beauty to be experienced? If they're lived well.

And that's what it's all about in the end, isn't it? Quality, not quantity. Magic over magnitude, grace over grandiosity. But if it's right for you, aim as high as you can imagine, and make big plans. In the end, the right plans for you end up being the biggest and best, however big or small they might seem to someone else.

The Good Wrinkles to Have

Age doesn’t just bring new wrinkles to your body, it can also bring new wrinkles to your thought, and these are good to have.

A perfectly smooth surface has no depth. 

There is deep texture to even simple wisdom.

No path worth taking will be just smooth and easy.

Life itself is never perfectly smooth. Our thoughts shouldn’t be, either.

There is a beauty to texture and depth.

If your body is going to show the magnitude of your experience, make sure your mind does, too.

The good wrinkles to have flow from experiences fully lived.