True and Useful™

Quote of the Week Arthur Koestler

"Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual."
                          ~ Arthur Koestler

The Power to Change Your Mind

Whenever you stop yourself in the middle of an overreaction to someone’s behavior, you have your own experience of mind power. This interruption of your response can feel a little like stepping outside of yourself, giving you the opportunity to see what you're doing and choose to do something different.

Every time you realize that your negative emotional reactions to others hurt you much more than they hurt them, you take another step forward in your awareness and increase your ability to determine your own experience.

You can add another layer of self determination by moving through the process of expanding your awareness with compassion and kindness for yourself rather than judgment and frustration.

How powerful would it feel to shift your experience of a challenging situation by stopping your internal reaction, seeing it clearly, choosing to let it go and being kind to yourself in the process?

~ A.G.R

love is a place by e. e. cummings

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

Quote of the Week Guilaume Apollinaire

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."
         ~ Guilaume Apollinaire

Bizarro by Dan Piraro

Bizarro.com

S-l-o-w Learner: Life and Death

S-l-o-w Learner is a series based on the premise that I seem to require more time than most to learn basic life lessons.

As I was following the casket at the funeral of yet another friend who had taken her last breath a few days earlier, I was once again struck with the realization of how fragile and fleeting this experience we call life really is. Walking along the corridors of the mausoleum past marble enclosures housing the departed, the muffled sounds of crying and shuffling feet echoing through the halls, I wondered how soon this memory would fade amid my daily preoccupations.

I listened to and participated in the comforting exchange of words among the mourners – the renewed pledges of love, the promises of staying close and spending more time really appreciating each other and the time we have together. I don’t doubt the sincerity, the good intentions, but I wonder about the follow through.

It seems that no matter how often I’m confronted with another ending, another experience of the narrowing circle of family and friends, it doesn’t take long to absorb the new reality and carry on as if nothing is more important than my personal agenda. I suppose this response, variously referred to as moving on, bouncing back, persevering, and letting go of the past, is a natural survival mechanism, and I don’t dispute it’s value. But do I learn anything; do I change, as a result of so life-altering an event as death?

When I take a hard look at my reaction, I realize that I may be operating under the dubious assumption that death is for other people. Regardless of the number of memorials I attend and the fact that loved ones with whom I’ve had a deep connection are no longer here, my behavior would indicate a person who thinks he has unlimited time to stop and smell the roses but only after all the important details of daily existence are attended to. While I would never express such an irrational notion out loud, I have only to look at what I do each day, operating for the most part within my carefully crafted parameters.

I envy people who seem to live more fully in the present and become more connected to others after having what they describe as near death experiences. Presumably surviving a miraculous firsthand confirmation of their own death is the lightning bolt needed to clear the fog of self-absorption.

You would think that watching someone you love take their last breaths and feeling the stillness of their absence as you walk behind their empty shell toward their final resting place would be a near enough death experience. It seems to me the very definition of slow learner that I still resist perhaps my most important lesson, not to miss the essence of life in the process of being busy living.

~ A.G.R

One Moment

A life-time is not what's between
the moments of birth and death.
A life-time is one moment
between my two little breaths.

The present, the here, the now,
That's all the life I get.
I live each moment in full,
In kindness, in peace, without regret.

~ Chade Meng

Quote of the Week Ram Dass

"The quieter you become,
the more you can hear."

~ Ram Dass