What is Love?

"The words of Jesus, “Love one another as I have loved you,” must be not only a light for us but a flame that consumes the self in us. Love, in order to survive, must be nourished by sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of self. Love, to be real, must cost—it must hurt—it must empty us of self."

--Mother Theresa 

“I love you, mother,” said little John;

Then, forgetting his work, his cap went on,

And he was off to the garden swing,

Leaving his mother the wood to bring.

“I love you, mother,” said rosy Nell;

“I love you better than tongue can tell;”

Then she teased and pouted full half the day,

Till her mother rejoiced when she went to play.

“I love you, mother,” said little Fan;

“To-day I’ll help you all I can;

How glad I am that school doesn’t keep!”

So she rocked the babe till it fell asleep.

Then, stepping softly, she fetched the broom,

And swept the floor, and dusted the room;

Busy and happy all day was she,

Helpful and happy as a child could be.

“I love you, mother,” again they said—

Three little children going to bed;

How do you think that mother guessed

Which of them really loved her best?

--Joy Allison, “Which Loved Best?” 

(McGuffey’s Third Eclectic Reader, 1879, 146–47)  

Turn off the TV and Get a Life!*

"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go read a good book."

--Groucho Marx 

Start Living in Prime Time

by Denis Waitley

Prime time is that period between 6 and 10 p.m. during which most of the general public watches television. Commercials in prime time are the most expensive, approaching a million dollars per minute. Your real success in life will take a quantum leap when you stop watching other people making money in their professions performing in prime time, and start living your own dreams and goals in prime time.

Time is the ultimate equal opportunity employer. Time never stops to rest, never hesitates, never looks forward or backward. Life's raw material spends itself in the now, this moment, which is why how you spend your time is far more important than all the material possessions you may own or positions you may obtain. Positions change, possessions come and go, you can earn more money. You can renew your supply of many things, but like good health, that other most precious resource, time spent is gone forever.

Each yesterday, and all of them together, are beyond your control. Literally all the money in the world can't undo or redo a single act you performed. You cannot erase a single word you said. You can't add an "I love you," "I'm sorry", or "I forgive you", not even a "thank you" you forgot to say. Each human being in every hemisphere and time zone has precisely 168 hours a week to spend. And some of the most precious hours occur in prime time.

Consider this: most of your daytime hours are spent helping other people solve their problems. The little time you have in the evenings and on weekends is all you have to spend on yourself, on your own dreams and goals, and personal development. Some thoughts to ponder:

1. Have supper with your loved ones at least two to three times per week. It's the best time for casual conversation to listen to what those close to you feel is important in their lives. Mealtime is a time to dialogue. 
2. A television set is an appliance. It should be used, at most, for two hours at a time. It should be off, unless specific programs of interest are selected. It should not be used as a one-eyed baby sitter. For the most part, TV exposes us to negative role models. 
3. Instead of watching television why not read a good fiction or non-fiction book, write a letter, engage in a hobby or craft, call a friend or someone in need of encouragement on the phone, network on your computer, go out to an ethnic restaurant, a home show, an entrepreneurial show, a musical recital, a play, a fitness class, or cultural event. Take an art or photography class. Use prime time to live the kind of life others put on layaway.

Action Idea: If you and your family/friends watch TV, try not turning it on for one week. When you do watch TV, reduce by 50% the amount of time you spend watching it. Concentrate your evenings and free time engaged in hands on, real life experiences, you can touch, feel, smell and engage all your senses in. Instead of virtual reality, insist on the real thing.

*Thanks to John Bytheway for sharing the article used for this blog post in his excellent talk on CD entitled, Turn Off the TV and Get a Life! 

Keep Breathing

Have you ever had one of those Murphy’s Law phases; you know, when it seems like anything that can go wrong, does? Yeah, I’m in one of those phases right now. Nothing really BIG is happening; just an accumulation of little things like broken cars, faucets, attitudes, etc. Life just feels heavy and I feel like I’m not in control of much.

Whenever life gets me down like this, I’ve taught myself to open up my quote closet and start pulling out words of wisdom on the topic of Adversity. I can’t count how many times this little act has helped me! Adversity quotes pump me up and make me feel courageous and capable.

It was during another comforting, encouraging visit to my quote closet that I came across one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, and wanted to share.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks, but I’ll just give a brief introduction just to set up the quote.

Chuck Nolan is the only survivor of a plane crash into the ocean and gets washed up on the shore of a remote island. He is resourceful and is able to survive for many years on the island. But after a while, the loneliness and hopelessness of his situation starts to get to him. It’s clear he won’t be rescued, he can’t escape, and he is faced with the prospect of the daily, monotonous grind of survival without hope of love or companionship. He had control over very little, so he decided he could at least control his death and tried to hang himself. After that failed, he resigned himself to meaningless survival, when a port-a-potty washes ashore and gives him the idea of a sail. He uses it in the construction of a boat, which he takes out on the open ocean, probably with the idea that he’d die at least TRYING to escape. At the brink of death, he is rescued and taken back to his home in Memphis, Tennessee where he learns that Kelly, the woman he was engaged to before the crash, thought him dead and eventually married another man. It is under these devastating circumstances that the best, most life-changing, hopeful scene in movie history takes place. I cry every time I watch it (or read the quote).

"A feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew…somehow…that I had to stay alive. I had to keep breathing, even though there was no reason to hope and all my logic said I would never see [home] again. So, that’s what I did. I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And one day all that logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in and gave me a sail. And now here I am. I’m back [in] Memphis…talking to you. I have ice in my glass. ... And I know what I have to do now…gotta keep breathing…because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”

--Chuck Nolan, played by Tom Hanks in Cast Away

Keep breathing. I can do that…

Quotes by Topic: Action

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."

--Katherine Mansfield, Journals

“Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action for all eternity.”

--Johann Kaspar Lavater

"The longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and feel 'I believe such and such to be true.' All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act."

--Thomas Huxley, Letter to Charles Kingsley, 1860

“The winds of Grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.”

--Sri Ramakrishna, (click here for the Savvy & Sage entry dedicated to this quote)

"The only things in which we can be said to have any property is our actions...Our actions must follow us beyond the grave: with respect to them alone we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world. Our actions must clothe us with an immortality, loathsome or glorious: these are the only title-deeds of which we cannot be disinherited: they will have their full weight in the balance of eternity, when everything else is as nothing."

--Charles Caleb Colton, The Lacon 

“Well done is better than well said.”

--Benjamin Franklin

"A life which does not go into action is a failure; and this is just as true of a prophet's, a poet's, or a scholar's life as it is true of the life of a 'man of action,' in the conventionally limited popular usage of the term."

--Arthur J. Toynbee, A Study of History

"I myself must mix with action lest I whither by despair."

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall

"The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.  Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures.  They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration." 

--Ernest Newman

"An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied."

--Arnold Glasow

"Note to self: finding a cool quote and writing it in your journal is not a substitute for Getting. It. Done."

--Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com

"All know the way; few actually walk it."

--Bodhidharma

The Daffodil Principle

"Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." 

--Lao Tzu

Always, when I think about this wonderful quote from Lao Tzu, a simple story from my bookshelf comes to mind that I will share today. I'm not exactly sure if it is a true story (although I'd like to think it is), but I sure have given it a lot of thought through the years since I discovered it. As I have tried to apply the principle in my life, I have found that it is absolutely imperative to constantly be living in the present. You MUST NOT think about the future or you will get overwhelmed by the largeness of your tasks. And you MUST NOT look back and glory in how far you've come or it will go to your head; or even worse, you'll think what you've done is 'good enough' and quit. This is very difficult for me, but something that I am constantly working on. I hope you'll enjoy! 

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The Daffodil Principle

By: Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards

Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, "Mother, you must come see the daffodils before they are over."

I wanted to go, but it was a two-hour drive from Laguna to Lake Arrowhead. "I'll come next Tuesday", I promised a little reluctantly, on her third call.

Next Tuesday dawned cold and rainy. Still, I had promised, and so I drove there.

When I finally walked into Carolyn's house and hugged and greeted my grandchildren, I said, "Forget the daffodils, Carolyn! The road is invisible in the clouds and fog, and there is nothing in the world except you and these children that I want to see bad enough to drive another inch."

My daughter smiled calmly and said, "We drive in this all the time, Mother."

"Well, you won't get me back on the road until it clears, and then I'm heading for home," I assured her.

"I was hoping you'd take me over to the garage to pick up my car."

"How far will we have to drive?"

"Just a few blocks", Carolyn said. "I'll drive. I'm used to this."

After several minutes, I had to ask, "Where are we going? This isn't the way to the garage."

"We're going to my garage the long way," Carolyn smiled, "by way of the daffodils." I sternly told Carolyn to please turn around.

"Mother, I promise. You will never forgive yourself if you miss this experience."

After about twenty minutes, we turned onto a small gravel road and I saw a small church. On the far side of the church I saw a hand-lettered sign that read "Daffodil Garden."

We got out of the car and each took a child's hand, and I followed Carolyn down the path. We turned a corner of the path and I looked up and gasped.

Before me lay the most glorious sight. It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it over the mountain peak and slopes.

The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns -- great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, saffron, and butter yellow.

Each different-colored variety was planted as a group so that it swirled and flowed like it's own river with its own unique hue.

There were five acres of flowers. "But who has done this?" I asked Carolyn.

"It's just one woman," Carolyn answered. "She lives on the property. That's her home." 

Carolyn pointed to a well kept A-frame house that looked small and modest in the midst of all that glory. We walked up to the house and on the patio, we saw a poster. "

Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Going To Ask" was the headline. We saw:

The first answer was a simple one. "50,000 bulbs," it read. The second answer was, "one bulb at a time, two hands, two feet and very little brain." The third answer was, "Began in 1958."

There it was, The Daffodil Principle. For me, that moment was a life changing experience.  

I thought of this woman whom I had never met, who more than forty years before, had begun one bulb at a time to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountain top. Still, planting one bulb at a time, year after year had changed the world in which she lived. She had created something of indescribable beauty and inspiration.

The principle her daffodil garden taught is one of the greatest principles of celebration. That is, learning to move toward our goals and desires one step at a time -- often just one baby-step at a time -- and learning to love the doing, learning to use the accumulation of time.

When we multiply tiny pieces of time with small increments of daily effort, we too will find we can accomplish magnificent things. We can change the world.

"It makes me sad in a way," I admitted to Carolyn. "What might I have accomplished if I had thought of a wonderful goal thirty-five or forty years ago and had worked away at it "one bulb at a time" through all those years. Just think what I might have been able to achieve!"

My daughter summed up the message of the day in her usual direct way. "Start tomorrow," she said.

 

It's so pointless to think of the lost hours of yesterdays. The way to make learning a lesson of celebration instead of a cause for regret is to only ask, "How can I put this to use today?"

Raise your Sail

Illustration: Mary Engelbreit

Quote: Sri Ramakrishna

                               

Lately, I have been pondering a lot on the idea presented in this quote—specifically the importance of Action.

I’m sure everyone else already has this figured out, but I just recently discovered that when I’m feeling down in the dumps, I feel better instantly if I can find one thing to ACT on.

For instance, I recently had a shift in my community of friends. Not a big change, yet it affected my mental state. I noticed myself slipping into some type of depressed longing for my old, comfortable community. 

I felt sorry for myself for a little while before I started praying to be delivered from my sadness. That’s when I was blessed with a sudden, inspired change of perspective. I stopped seeing my life as happening to me and started seeing it as a fertile field. And what does one do with a fertile field? Sit around lamenting the lack of plants? No, one plants the field! Ah-hah! What I needed to do was ACT!

And that’s exactly what I did. I baked a batch of homemade bread, took a loaf to one of the ladies I didn’t know in my new community, offering friendship. While the act didn’t exactly start a new friendship as I hoped, I did discover that it wasn’t so much about the reward; it was the ACT that made me feel better! And come to think of it, even the prayer was an act. Grace was there, like the quote says, I just had to raise my sail and ask for it.

Since learning this lesson, I have found it useful and effective whenever I get a little blue about anything—life, family, friendship, difficulty, disappointment, that heavy overwhelmed feeling, you name it. Action has been an instant escape button – a miracle cure – every time!

So next time life gets ya down, pick your preferred metaphor (“Raise your Sail,” “Plant your Field,” or the old standby, “Make Lemonade”) and just ACT. It may just heal your heart like it does mine.