We shouldn’t just look for new things to experience; we should also work on the renewal of ourselves. And that takes work. “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new” (Ursula LeGuin).
“What you wish for your neighbor, that you ask for yourself. If you don’t wish his good, you ask for your own death” (Angelus Silesius). We can’t neglect others without hurting ourselves, but neither can we help others without uplifting ourselves.
Benevolence requires practice, and not many days go by that don’t give us opportunities to practice. What are we waiting for? The good that comes from showing goodwill is too good to save up for the big situations. Benevolence is an everyday quality!
Coaching amounts to teaching. And both coaching and teaching, by means of accurate feedback, help others to see what it’s so hard to see with our own eyes: how we can perform to the best of our ability in ways that best serve the goals of the team.
Thinking about what we experience adds a new depth to our enjoyment of the world. “Thinking,” as Lord George Noel Gordon Brown described it, “is the magic of the mind.” Not only can we enjoy things, we can enjoy the fact that we are enjoying them!
We can grow better relationships by nourishing the quality of love we show. Amazing transformations in relationships can take place when we feed the affection that’s in our own hearts (or even used to be there), regardless of the immediate response.
Life can be complicated. The surface appearance of things can be deceiving. So we often need to slow down and call a halt to the commerce. If we’ll listen, our hearts and our consciences will tell us what the essentials have always been.
Reverence must be more than words or feelings. It is a right orientation to, and a real-life relationship with, all that is above us. If there is a God, then reverence would be a worshipful manner of actually dealing with that objective reality.
Meditation is not easy or convenient. It is a discipline that has to be learned. But not only that, it takes being willing to let go of some of our activities in order to have the time to meditate. We can’t have it both ways, and it’s foolish to try.
Summer is often tied in our minds to the intense happiness of childhood. I couldn’t agree more with Edith Wharton, who said, “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
