To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all our lives—the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections—that requires hard spiritual work.
Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment.
Henri Nouwen
A similar thought to yesterdays. A lot of our worries about the coming day or the coming week are just thoughts many of which will never happen. We frequently compare our day to how we think it should be, or our experience to how it was better in the past:
Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That’s all there is. That’s all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it’s all a shame, and on and on; it’s all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Despite the fact that advertisers want us to focus on the next big thing and that the stores already have Easter Eggs on their shelves, it is good to maintain the natural, more interior and quiet, rhythms of winter.
Just because someone has invented a clock
doesn’t mean you have to hurry through life.
Russell C. Means, Oglala Sioux American Indian activist
You can either practice being right
or practice being kind
Anne Lamott
Cold nights followed by wind and rain. Grey winter weather causing colds and flu, as the holiday season is well and truly over.
Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou
The question is not, never, ever, whether or not we will be given challenges and limitations. We will. The question is, how will we hold them, how will we be changed, how will they shape us, what will we bring to the healing of them, what, if anything will be born in its place.
Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having and Doing Enough
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