Entries from September 2007 ↓

In a recent post at Monk at Work, Adam Kayce presents some interesting food for thought. He says that connecting with your own purpose and passion isn’t the same as connecting with the Divine.

He doesn’t say how you can tell the difference, but it doesn’t matter. My own view of spirituality is more simple and more direct. I agree with the Dalai Lama that we can’t know about the Divine, and that the purpose of human life is happiness, which comes from having love and compassion for one another. He also says the greatest teachers aren’t the gurus, but people who teach others the experience of unconditional love.

Since I believe that, I’m forced to admit that I fall far short of some of my greatest role models…dogs. And I’m not alone in thinking of animals as teachers. A recent Beliefnet article is about how horses, cats and dogs have inspired people. One woman refers to her dog “…as my furry Buddha. Before he came into our lives, there was a hole within me that I couldn’t quite fill up. I looked into different spiritualities, donated my time to different organizations, and tried different hobbies. All were learning experiences and often enjoyable, but they never quite filled me. Days after Donnelly arrived, I realized the searching and the ache were subsiding. I now have direction and focus, and I have an understanding of what unconditional love really is. Thanks to Donnelly, I have discovered a passion for helping animals, and I have found fulfillment working to make their lives better.”

Amen to that.

About compassion…I’ll never be able to think of that word again without this picture filling my mind. (I can’t publish it here because of copyright restrictions.) The 9-year-old boy is bald because of chemotherapy, but he looks like a Buddhist monk. His head is resting on a very sick dog, and he’s holding the dog’s ear. His mother had been taking him to the local shelter on weekends to spend time with the animals there. The boy bonded with one frightened dog, so the mother brought the dog home “just for the weekend.” The first night the dog became so sick they had to rush him to the emergency room. That was the night the picture was taken. Needless to say, the dog never went back to the shelter. And five years later they’re both doing fine.

So…love, compassion and a lot of humility. That’s my spiritual practice. What about you? Do you have one? Or are you doing just fine without one? This site is about sharing, so please tell us your thoughts in the comment section below.

Picture of dog by Aaron Honey.

In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, Emily, the central character, has died in childbirth. She is allowed to come back to earth to revisit one day in her life. She has been warned it will be more than she can handle, but she decides to do it anyway.

She chooses to come back on the day she turned 12. She watches herself and her family for a bit and can’t take anymore–-it’s just too much. It’s too much to see all the things she took for granted while she was alive, things she yearns for now that she can no longer have them…simple little things like her mother… and father… and eating…and sleeping… and flowers… and hot baths. She had thrown it all away by not paying attention when she had the chance.

I saw that play when I was 12 years old, and it taught me a lesson I have never forgotten. So I was delighted to discover that the site every, every minute is based on one of Emily’s lines:

Bob, the author, explains, “With this blog, I am trying to fully ‘realize’ my life by documenting the things that I love.” And that, I think, is blogging at its best…honoring the things we love by writing about them and sharing them with others. Writing helps us wake up to those precious moments that go by all too fast.

Photo by Tryne via Flickr. Creative Commons license.

If I were in the above picture, I would be the fellow in green, looking down, not quite in synch with the others. I would be thinking, “Is this how I want to spend my life…tagging behind others, expected to walk in lock-step? The answer, of course, would be no!

That’s no doubt why Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish, Steve Jobs’ 2005 graduation address at Stanford, resonated so strongly in me. I saved the newspaper article that printed it, but I needn’t have bothered. It touched so many other hearts it’s readily available on the web, not just the text, but also the video version.

Steve’s message is: our time on earth is limited, “so don’t waste it living someone else’s life…have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

He’s not promising life will always be easy. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” if you love what you do, you can handle it.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

What do you think? How does Steve’s advice apply to your life?

Japanese photo by jfchenier at Flickr. Creative Commons license.Steve Jobs photo by Jacob Botter at Flickr. Creative Commons license.

Notice there’s a new page, Personal Development List, listed in the blog menu in the right sidebar, right after the site search. It includes a recent copy of Priscilla Palmer’s compilation. Thanks, Priscilla!

Thank you, Lord, for the opportunity. I sure hope you know what you’re doing.

I’m not a religious person. In fact, I don’t intellectually believe in a theist god, one who gets involved in the affairs of humans. But that doesn’t mean that prayer isn’t the most empowering approach when things go wrong. The above prayer popped into my mind one day as a metaphor for what I wanted as my approach to life. It has a certain amount of humor in it, and it recognizes that we don’t have to like what is going on. But it also affirms my willingness to keep open to life and to be grateful.

An article written by Peggy Senger Parsons, entitled The Spiritual Discipline of Gratitude, explains how she learned to integrate that practice into her everyday life. It’s very hard to do at times, she points out. But the rewards are enormous:

If I start and end my day with gratitude, nothing that happens in between has the power to ruin tomorrow.

That’s the best explanation I’ve heard of why gratitude has such a profound effect on our health and happiness. The more we can appreciate our lives, the less emotional baggage we have to carry around. Gratitude is liberating and empowering. It’s an attitude well worth practicing.

Picture by The Marmot at Flickr. Creative Commons License.

For related articles see Rx for Life: Gratitude and The Wisdom of Warren Buffett.