Maybe we need to struggle for meaning, we just need to struggle well. The satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals but from struggling well – Ray Dalio
Be still, be silent, pay attention
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose your response. In your response lies your growth and your freedom – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Despair = Suffering minus Meaning, presuming suffering is a constant that cannot be changed. Making efforts to augment meaning may necessarily decrease Despair.
Anxiety = Uncertainty times Powerlessness
Disappointment = Expectations minus Reality
Happiness equals
Wanting what we have (gratitude)
Divided by
Having what we want (gratification)
–
Choose well. Your career, your friends, your mates, your investments. It’s often about choosing well.
Presuming we remain on a path of spiritual development, perhaps we should aspire to aging, when we may too often fear it
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid – Friedrich Buechner
Notes and thoughts on love and life stemming from priests, gurus and sages, especially after a beautiful wedding:
Putting your life in your loves hands. That’s what we do in marriage. We put our lives in each other’s hands
Don’t just be.
Be the spouse your partner deserves
And honour them
and love them
The phase in a relationship where you’re not sure if you want to leave your partner or stay with them. The phase where you fight and break up. The phase where you then get back together. This phase is apparently common, and, if you do reunite, the subsequent connection is apparently deeper than the first, often leading to long-lasting, deep intimacy and connection
God (love) is looking through your partner’s eyes at you and through your eyes at your partner, but the ego creates the illusion that you’re separate people
And now, with this illusion of being separate, there’s a way for love to have currency, to interact with this reality
If god (love) was just looking at god (love) in the mirror, there’d be nothing to see, because god (love) is unconditional
God is unconditional love
When you look at someone else you see the illusion that there’s someone else there that you love. And because you direct your love to it, love (or god) now has currency. God then has the experience of loving god.
Through the illusion of individuality, thanks to the ego (I-ness) we have the ability to connect with the other (we-ness)
The more you learn to love yourself, the more you can love the other
The more you love the other (birds, bees, trees, nature, microorganisms and people) the more you realize you are the other