Is the concept of Living Life Fully even helpful these days? Are all of the words and ideas and concepts that encourage people to live their lives fully out of date and irrelevant? This series is inspired simply by the state of the world today--we're living in a world of division and anger and even hatred, and at times it seems impossible to feel any sort of peace with all that's going on. It seems for many people that their stability and safety in life are being stripped away, leaving them to fend for themselves in a world that doesn't seem to want to help. Personally, I'm not at all fond of the directions our world is taking, and I'm very frustrated that there seems to be little to nothing that I'm able to do to make anything better for anyone--I just have to go along for the ride as everyone else does. As I go, though, I want to look for the little things I might be able to do to make the world a more pleasant place for others--spreading kind words, being considerate and polite, encouraging and complimenting--all little things, but for someone with no real wealth and no way to accumulate wealth, they're ways that I can contribute to the positive energy of the world--and when we add my contribution to your contribution to his contribution to the contributions of thousands of other people, suddenly it doesn't seem so trivial.
Can you commit to spreading as much positive energy, as many positive thoughts and ideas, as you can each day? I really do believe that it's going to take each one of us who truly wants a kind and gentle world in which EVERYONE feels loved and accepted to focus on our own efforts, and make sure that they're consistent and consistently kind and positive.
The world seems to be in an awful state--but is it hopeless? I hope not--the history of humankind has always been a rollercoaster ride with its ups and downs and brutal moves from left to right and back again, and we find ourselves in one of the valleys now, when human nature is being shown in so many ugly and unpleasant ways. But I still have my life, and I have my own world to live in, my microworld among the macroenvironments that make up this planet and its people and all of the natural world that's here with us. One thing that I can do on a tiny level is try to explore the concept of Living Life Fully and how it can be achieved in a world that seems so darned unfriendly. After all, my doctorate is in Teaching and Learning, and I've done a lot of learning in my life. Perhaps it's time for me to pass on what I've learned in small doses, with the intent of helping others to see more clearly some of the concepts that I've learned about, and to help others put into practice strategies that can help them to get more out of the lives that they're living.
So here goes. Today I start with Gentleness, a concept that many people today see as weakness, but which can be one of the most effective strategies we can adopt in the effort to live our lives more fully. We must remember that our gentleness doesn't need to be world-changing in order to be important or effective. But it will be life-changing, both for us and for those people who are on the receiving end of our gentle actions.
Gentleness
Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong. -Leo Buscaglia
We're seeing a lot of cruelty in the world today, and it can be very tempting to want to completely do away with it, to want to change the hearts of cruel people so that they're no longer cruel. We can't do that, though. No matter how many people post negative attacks on cruel people on social media, the fact is that tomorrow, the cruel people will still be here, and they'll still be cruel. We change very little by attacking, but we can change a lot by being gentle and kind. Today I'm going to do my best to be gentle: to give a gentle response to an aggressive person; to gently remind someone that being kind to others is important; to gently correct someone with the truth when they're spewing lies. Gentleness doesn't always have immediate effects, but the long-term effects can be extremely awesome; we just have to trust that our gentleness today will have a positive effect on the world tomorrow. We can let the weak be cruel, but it would be a terrible thing to emulate them simply to placate them. We can disagree with them aggressively, which will probably cause more conflict, or we can gently correct them, and put our hopes in long-term effects rather than short-term returns. When we're gentle, we're giving hope to others that perhaps things can get better, and I hope that my gentleness will sooth an aching soul rather than rile it up even further.
