Safe Solutions

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If your state of mind is coming from a place of fear and risk avoidance, then you will always settle for the safe solutions—the solutions already applied many times before. Sometimes, the path already taken is the best solution. But you should not follow the path automatically without first seeing it for what it really is. When you are open to possibilities, you may find that the common way is the best way for your particular case. However, this will be a choice you made not by habit, but by reflection and in the spirit of a fresh beginner with fresh eyes and a new perspective. 

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

Diminishing our Pain

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People say to me, "Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain—it’s not Auschwitz." This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we’re still choosing to be victims. We’re judging ourselves. I don’t want you to hear my story and say, "My own suffering is less significant. " I want you to hear my story and say, "If she can do it, then so can I."

 Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

Self-Renewal & Motivation

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The self-renewing man is highly motivated and respects the sources of his own energy and motivation. He has the priceless quality of enthusiasm.  He knows how important it is to believe in what he is doing. 

He knows how important it is to pursue the things about which he has a deep conviction. Enthusiasm for the task to be accomplished lifts him out of the ruts of habit and customary procedure. Drive and conviction give him the courage to risk failure. (One of the reasons mature persons stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.) And not only does he respond to challenge, but he also sees the challenge where others fail to see it . . . 

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

The Nazis hung him (on this date in 1945)

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi in 1943 for his work with the resistance. He had been warned not to speak publicly.  He did so anyway and was hanged April 9, 1945. Ethics is a gathering of his notes for an intended work on the subject, hidden in a garden before they could be seized by the police. Here is one paragraph contrasting the Ethics of Kant to Christ: 

Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but He loved the real man. He was not, like a philosopher, interested in the 'universally valid,' but rather in that which is of help to the real and concrete human being. What worried him was not, like Kant, whether the 'maxim of an action can become a principle of general legislation', but whether my action is at this moment helping my neighbor become a man before God. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Stephen Goforth

 

Change, Paradigm Shifts

Renewal and Friendship

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The self-renewing man has mutually fruitful relations with other human beings. They are capable of accepting love and capable of giving it – both more difficult achievements than is commonly thought. And what has that to do with self-renewal? The man or woman who is incapable of accepting love or of giving it is imprisoned, cut off from a great part of the world of experience. Love and friendship dissolve the rigidities of the isolated self, force new perspectives, alter judgments, and keep in working order the emotional substratum on which all profound comprehensive of human affairs must rest.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

Renewal Happens 

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Renewal comes neither by taking a rest nor changing the scenery, nor by adding something new to our lives, but by ending whatever is, and then entering a temporary state of chaos when everything is up for grabs and anything is possible. Then we can come out of what is really a death-and-rebirth process with a new identity, a new sense of purpose, and a new store of life energy.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

 

A loss can set you free

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Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears. Perhaps therein lies a lesson for each of us. I know, I know: You’re no Beethoven. But as you read the lines above, maybe you could relate to the great composer’s loss in some small way. Have you lost something that defined your identity? Maybe it involves your looks. Or your social prestige. Or your professional relevance. How might this loss set you free? 

You might finally define yourself in new ways, free from the boundaries you set for yourself based on the expectations of others. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in the Washington Post