Finally Finishing--A Paragraph a Day

What a relief it is to finally finish a job that I've been working on a while.  After a leaking dishwasher ruined our floor, I've spent the last couple of weeks tearing out an old floor (which meant taking off the molding and door frames, of course), cleaning up the mold and glue, shopping for new flooring and underlayment, and actually putting in the floor and installing a new dishwasher.  It's been a lot of work, but what a great feeling it is to be able to say, "It's done."  If there's any sort of argument for perseverance that's super strong, it's the fact that the feeling we get when we finish something that's been difficult is a truly beautiful feeling, one of accomplishment and pride and all sort of other stuff mixed together.  When I rode my bike 400 miles in June, the feeling that I had when I rode into the town that was my final destination was incredible.  And the feeling happened only because I persevered and made it all the way--it couldn't have happened any other way.  I know quite a few people who almost never feel that way because they so often give up before they finish what they started, and I feel very bad for them.  There's a chance that they're building habits that will never allow them to actually finish something that's a long-term project, so there's a chance that they'll never experience the feeling of having persevered and accomplished something that they set their minds to.  Personally, I try to remind myself of the value of perseverance as much as I can because I definitely want to keep feeling that feeling.

So Much to Learn--A Paragraph a Day

One of the huge advantages that I find in our current technologically centered world is that some types of information that we spread with that technology can be very fascinating, indeed.  Pretty much anything I want to read is available to me somewhere, somehow, and we have many more people making films than we used to, of all sorts of cultures all around the world.  The improvements made to cameras and microphones make them easy to carry and to use, and this allows for people to film stuff that they never could film before.  I'm teaching a World Studies course in high school right now, and I've made it a video-based course (mostly because no other materials are available to me), and we're able to see videos filmed in some of the most remote regions of Asia, Africa, and South America.  We're able to see what people eat in Tanzania and Bolivia; we're able to go to school with kids in Burundi and Finland; we're able to see what winters are like in Siberia and summers in the Sahara.  I feel as though I've learned more through videos over the last few years than I ever could have previously, and I love that fact.  Of course, I don't want to be addicted to the screen and I make sure that I don't watch TOO much, but it's nice to be able to take advantage of some of this technology and learn as much as I can about my fellow human beings--people whom I'll never meet, but who have a lot to teach me.

Encouragement Is So Simple--A Paragraph a Day

I find it fascinating just how rare encouragement seems to be these days.  It's something that's so incredibly simple to give, yet relatively rare when we compare it to things like criticism and sarcasm.  So many people that I see in the world want to be critics or comedians, telling other people the flaws they see or deciding to make a joke about something rather than giving positive feedback that can give the other person strength and optimism.  I've seen far too many people, young and old, share an achievement with someone else only to hear something like, "Don't give up your day job," a response that's sure to discourage rather than encourage.  And even when someone follows up a response like that with "I'm just kidding," it doesn't really matter--the damage has been done.  First responses are incredibly important to us, and when we try to be funny or harsh rather than encouraging, we've lost a great opportunity to help out another person with words that are free and easy to say, choosing instead to focus on ourselves and our opinions.  Of course, encouragement must be sincere and we shouldn't lie to someone who has brought us something awful and tell them it's good, but we can still encourage the effort involved.  In my life, relatively few people actively encouraged me, and I know that those people who did live on in my heart as very dear people, indeed.

It's Going to Be a Beautiful Day--A Paragraph a Day

It's sometimes frustrating to see just how often I have to remind myself of the fact that every day can be beautiful, and that the quality of any given day is dependent more upon the attitude that I bring to it than to things that happen outside of my sphere of influence.  I'm going to school today, and I'm going to teach.  There will be stress, there will be annoyances and negative situations, but the positives of the situation far outweigh the negatives.  I get to work with young people who have their whole lives ahead of them, and I get to at least try to influence them in positive ways.  I often don't achieve this goal, but I often do--it's an up-and-down effort.  But I know that at least I have the chance to try, and on this particular day those chances stretch out before me in my very near future.  I may fail miserably today, but even in a day's failure there are things to learn that may make tomorrow better.  The chances are, though, that I'm not going to fail, and I get to say hello to some very nice young people.  I get to talk with some of them, and I have a chance to build them up by encouraging them and complimenting them (with only sincere compliments, of course!)  I get to eat some nice meals today (and some chocolate) and drink coffee and wine, I get to go running or bike riding, I get to feel the fresh air and listen to music and watch something on TV if I feel like it.  How this day turns out really is up to me, and I'm going to do my best to make sure that the day ahead of me turns out just as I've predicted in the title.

Getting out and Doing Something--A Paragraph a Day

Often when I get home after work, I feel tired and I want to do nothing but sit down and have a glass of wine or something.  I want to relax and recharge, and I don't want to do anything too active because I'm very tired.  Experience tells me, though, that that's exactly when I need to do something.  When I feel that way and I go for a run or a bike ride, or I start working on a project around the house, I feel more rejuvenated than I would have felt sitting down.  Using my body helps my body to kind of shift gears, to move into a different mode that actually feels very good to me, even though some minutes before I felt like any physical activity would have been too much.  It's nice to know this because now I'm able to tell myself, "No, I don't feel like going for a run, but I know from experience that it's going to feel good as soon as I start."  Far too often, we take the easy way out, and for me that would mean pouring the glass of wine and sitting down with a book or a computer.  But my body needs exercise just as much as it needs food, and my mind does much better when it's actively engaged in the world around me, so I'm glad that I'm able to overcome the feelings of tiredness and actually go out and exercise some.  Our bodies and minds can fool us and convince us to do things that aren't necessarily in the body's best interest, so it's good to be aware of their tendency to try to get us to take the easy way out rather than taking the most beneficial route.

Experience: A Wonderful Teacher--A paragraph a Day

I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives.
But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are.
Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake.   -Luis Miguel


It's fascinating how life works.  I had thought that things had settled down a bit, that I was going to be able to go for a certain amount of time without anything drastic happening, but then some members of my family decided to dash that thought to tiny little pieces.  And over the summer, a very negative and difficult time played out in my life.  But I made it through, and I did my best to keep reminding myself that no matter how difficult things got, other people have much more difficult problems to deal with, and I was being exposed to an opportunity to learn through trial, and it was a trial that definitely wasn't going to kill me or destroy any part of my life.  So I made it through and I learned a lot, all because I was pushed into a situation in which I ended up learning a lot about my family and myself, and which brought back a whole lot of childhood issues, many of which I'm afraid were never fully processed--so I have the chance now to process some of the things that could have been processed decades ago, had I had any support at the time that would have allowed me to do so.  I like Luis' words here--our experiences make us who we are.  We learn from them, or we don't.  I would add that our responses to those experience play a great role in how much or just what we learn, but this passage is just as good without my addition.  What are you going through right now?  What did you go through in July, or in the spring, or in the winter?  What did it teach you?  Did you learn those lessons and take them to heart?  It's important that you do so because life gives us ways to learn all the time, but it's up to us to learn from them or not, to see their value or to let them harm us.  I prefer to learn from my experiences, as the more I learn, the more I grow more fully into the person I'm meant to be.

What Do I "Deserve"?--A Paragraph a Day

There is too little idea of personal responsibility;
too much of "the world owes me a living,"
forgetting that if the world does owe you a living,
you must be your own collector.   -Theodore N. Vail

I start with the above quotation because it seems to me that this tendency is getting more and more predominant among people, especially here in the United States.  Our tendency to feel entitled to whatever it is we think we deserve is getting stronger, and unfortunately, we're getting more and more willing to harm other people in our quest to collect that which we think we deserve.  Our characters are being warped by our thoughts of what we deserve without doing any work to get it.  The truth of the matter is that we truly "deserve" very little as human being who just happened to be born into the society in which we were born.  I believe that because we're born into a society, we are entitled to the very basics of life, such as food and shelter and clothing on a basic level, but anything beyond that should be worked for, should be achieved--because that's what helps human beings to grow and develop and get stronger in life, the effort and work that it takes to make a great career, to buy just the right house, to reach a state of abundance rather than wallowing in a state of want.  The world has a whole lot to offer us, but many people see what it has to offer and simply say, "I should have that because I deserve it."  They don't keep in mind that other people have had to struggle harder than they have, that many have come into the world with far fewer privileges than they've enjoyed--and perhaps, those other people "deserve" those things even more.  But life isn't about looking around to try to find things that I deserve to have--rather, it's about coming to terms with those things that I truly desire, and then getting to work to accomplish what I need to accomplish to get them.