Tag: Life

The vulnerability of life

Karl Duffy1 Comment
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Things are changing all the time. This makes us seek who and what will anchor us in all of this change:
Life is precious. Not because it is unchangeable, like a diamond, but because it is vulnerable, like a little bird.
To love life means to love its vulnerability, asking for care, attention, guidance, and support.
Life and death are connected by vulnerability.
The newborn child and the dying elder both remind us of the preciousness of our lives.
Let’s not forget the preciousness and vulnerability of life during the times we are successful and popular.
Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

The kingdom of the eternal

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When we love and allow ourselves to be loved,

we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal.  

Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy.

John O’Donohue, AnamCara

Every simple act

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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We must remind ourselves that, though our lives are small and our acts seem insignificant. we are generative elements of this universe, and we create meaning with every act that we perform or fail to perform.

It is here, on this earth, in the day-to-day, on our street corners, at our evening table, in the homes of our friends, at the bedside of the sick, in the warmth or sadness of our child’s days, that the universe is being formed. 

Kent Nerburn, Make me a channel of your peace

Sunday Quote: Grounded inside yourself

Karl Duffy3 Comments

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In the past days,  how many times have we run this way and that, expending energy in places that don’t really align with the deepest sense of where we are going?

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save;

they just stand there shining

Anne Lamott

Problems and Inconveniences

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If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you have a problem.

Everything else is an inconvenience.

Life is an inconvenience.

Learn to separate the inconveniences from the real problems.

You will live longer.

Robert Fulghum, American author and Unitarian Minister, 

Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door

Fail better

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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One of the biggest challenges in life is how we deal with disappointment:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett, Worstword Ho, 1983

So what I’m saying is: fail. Then fail again, and then maybe you start to work with some of the things I’m saying. And when it happens again, when things don’t work out, you fail better. In other words, you are able to work with the feeling of failure instead of shoving it under the rug, blaming it on somebody else, coming up with a negative self-image — all of those futile strategies.

“Fail better” means you begin to have the ability to hold what I call “the rawness of vulnerability” in your heart, and see it as your connection with other human beings and as a part of your humanness. Failing better means when these things happen in your life, they become a source of growth, a source of forward, a source of, “out of that place of rawness you can really communicate genuinely with other people.” Your best qualities come out of that place because it’s unguarded and you’re not shielding yourself. 

Pema Chodron

photo jorg hempel