Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
Life fishtails its way across an undulating landscape. If you want to live, you need to give yourself over to the way of transition—to let go when life presents you with a time of ending, to abandon yourself to the neutral zone when that is where you find yourself, to seize the opportunity to make a new beginning when that moment presents itself.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
#GOODNEWS
A man who is choosing to remain anonymous jumped into the water after a multi-vehicle crash on a bridge in Ocean City, Maryland, in order to save a child who fell out of a car. Read the story here.
Don’t hold me accountable… hold me close. -Bob Goff
Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
The difference between God and us is that he never thinks that he’s us.
Asking for help is smart. It's also the answer to fatigue and the "I'm indispensable" image. But something keeps us from this wise course of action, and that something is pride. Plain, stubborn unwillingness to admit need. The result, painful though it is to admit, is a lifestyle of impatience. We become easily irritated- often angry. We work long hours. Take less time off. Forget how to laugh. Cancel vacations. And all the while the specter of discouragement looms across our horizon like a dark storm front,- threatening to choke out any remaining sunshine.
Say, my friend, it's time to declare it. You are not the Messiah of the twentieth century! There is no way you can keep pushing your life at that pace and expect to stay effective. Analyze yourself any way you please, you are H-U-M-A-M... nothing more. So? So slow down. So give yourself a break. So stop trying to cover all the bases and sell popcorn in the stands at the same time. So relax for a change!
Charles Swindoll, Encourage Me
#GOODNEWS
Steelers Draft Pick Najee Harris Hosts Draft Party at Homeless Shelter Where He Used to Live.
"There was a time I needed a helping hand. They gave us an opportunity to get back on our feet. So it is my job to give back."
Whatever team drafts Alabama's Najee Harris is getting a special person. Today he threw a draft party for kids at the homeless shelter where he lived for several years growing up. He told me it was emotional the first time he went back to visit. @kron4news #NFLDraft #RollTide pic.twitter.com/JadBIFh4pd
— Kylen Mills (@KylenMills) April 30, 2021
Read the story here.
Many young people have stopped learning in the religious or spiritual dimensions of their lives long before they graduate from college. Some settle into rigid and unchanging political and economic views by the time they are twenty-five or thirty. By their mid-thirties most will have stopped acquiring new skills or new attitudes in any central aspect of their lives.
As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things. As the years go by we view our familiar surrounding with less and less freshness of perception. We no longer look with a wakeful, perceiving eye at the faces of people we see every day, nor at any other features of our everyday world.
That is why travel is a vivid experience for most of us. At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.
It is not unusual to find that the major changes in life - marriage, a move to a new city, a new job, or a national emergency - reveal to us quite suddenly how much we have been imprisoned by the comfortable web we had woven around ourselves. Unlike the jailbird, we don't know that we have been imprisoned until after we have broken out.
John Gardner, Self-Renewal
Do a lot of reading. Talk to a lot of people. Do a lot of listening. -Joyce Carol Oates
Do you face the possibility of an adverse event? Don’t worry. Who knows, it may turn out to be good for you. Doubting the consequences of an outcome will allow you to remain imperturbable.
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swain
Confusion isn’t the enemy of understanding, they are allies. -Rhett Allain
Most people wait until everything is just right before they do anything. They refuse to go out on a limb because they don’t understand that the fruit is always out on the limb – Zig Ziglar
It's not about “being.” It’s about “becoming.” –Stephen Goforth (born April 24, 1961)
When you teach people to hate you teach people to wound themselves. -Alice Walker
#GOODNEWS
An amateur radio operator who Tweets public alerts about natural disasters helped authorities to find a hiker lost in the wilderness. ABC-7 in Los Angeles has a video report (below) or read the story here.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence. -Immanuel Kant (born April 22, 1724)
Budgets are moral documents.
Being in power is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t. –Margaret Thatcher
A growth mindset suggests that you can grow, expand, evolve, and change. Intelligence and capability are not fixed points but instead traits you cultivate. A growth mindset releases you from the expectation of being perfect. Failures and mistakes are not indicative of the limits of your intellect but rather tools that inform how you develop. A growth mindset is liberating, allowing you to find value, joy, and success in the process, regardless of the outcome.
Cultivating a growth mindset can begin with shifting your inner dialogue from beliefs about your ability (a fixed mindset) to beliefs about your opportunities and needs (a growth mindset)—for example, from “I’m terrible at giving presentations” to “I need more practice presenting in front of others.”
Similarly, “I’m not good enough to be promoted to supervisor” might become “I need some additional experience before I’ll be ready for promotion.” Simple restatements have a dramatic impact on what you believe about your own abilities. A fixed mindset often runs deep; it may take constant practice to reframe your default thoughts.
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