I run across sayings that I love almost anywhere. Maybe you do too. Ideas arising out of thoughtfulness or close observation or a fine mind. One of my favorites is by Socrates: "Beware the Barrenness of a Busy Life" (Post 7/29/23).
Maybe some of these will resonate with you.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Creating the future is one reason young people go to college. My oldest grandchild is creating a future where he will be a civil engineer. We find our life-partner, perhaps have children, buy homes, choose careers and save money all to create our futures. It's even why we plant gardens I suppose, or tulip bulbs in the fall. That way we have created our spring. By gathering wood, I have created a fireside winter. Almost everything we do or fail to do creates our future. Such responsible persons are we!
"You can't use up creativity. The more you use the more you have." Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
"You can't use up creativity. The more you use the more you have." Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
Haven't you found this to be true? Unlike willpower, which depletes, creativity thrives on itself. I like that this was said by Maya Angelou, poet, singer, memoirist, civil rights activist. Reading about her life is like reading biographies of multiple people, all that she did, from becoming a mother at age 17 to being the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco to reciting her poetry at a presidential inauguration.
Maya Angelou also said, "Success is liking yourself." What could be more important? How topsy-turvy that inner critic can make us. Liking yourself makes life a fine thing. How different this is than saying that success is having money or a big house or power and prestige.
She also believed that "Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space." "Invite one to stay," she said. Sometimes our fears give rise to courage and courage births hope. There is always something to hope for, even if it is, at last, God's strength and mercy.
Keep quiet more often and see what happens.
So much of what's worthwhile requires quiet: meditation, our thoughts, prayer, empathy, planning, forgiving (which happens first in the mind), focus, concentration. An unknown writer has said, "What if your fairy Godmother is the wisest, smartest version of yourself, whispering from the future: Stop treating yourself as an afterthought. Say the truth you are carrying in your heart like a hidden treasure." Well, we'd have to be quiet to hear her, wouldn't we?
Nothing is missing. You are already whole.
A lovely reminder. Surely this is how God thinks of us. How God made us. And of course, it is true of the person sitting next to us on the bus, on the park bench, in our workplace or schoolroom. Or the person in the migrant boat or across the border. Like we, they are whole. How then must we behave?
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| Illustration, Meera Lee Patel |
"Life is hard but so very beautiful." Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln was touched by many griefs, including the loss of his and his wife's children. Today (and then), some people's lives are so hard that the beauty seems hidden from them, smothered perhaps. Buried under two jobs and not enough family time. Or supplanted by a hunger for food and safety. Or subsumed by war or flood or fire. Or, in Lincoln's time, by the cruelty of enslavement.
A version of this quotation is on a flowery outdoor wall mural in my hometown attributed to a local writer, although many have said something similar. This writer became aware of life's hardships when they became her own.
Not so for many, those who have long seen both the difficulty and beauty, who haven't needed hardship to befall them personally to recognize this. Who have always known that life's intensity flows in both directions. Some days are hard, beyond-belief-hard. And all days are hard for someone. But the morning sun rises and the evening sun sets--always beautiful.
Nina Naomi
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