Tag Archives: how to live

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Delight in the Innocence

This is a gift worth saving and sharing on with a friend. So, I’m doing it here and now for you. Will you share it with someone you love? 

Kayden + Rain from Nicole Byon on Vimeo.

There is sadness in the world today. There is never enough money, time, love, joy…and the examples are many.

I know a sensitive boy who misses his home and his friends. There is nothing his parents can do. They do what they can and this doesn’t change the fact that this boy, now a teen, soon to be a young man, misses his best friends and the sense that he belongs somewhere. His home is where he is not. It is anywhere but where he is. As a long-time traveller, expatriate and now migrant, I understand the feeling. You feel trapped, and you are, in your mind and for real.

Without money, Continue reading Delight in the Innocence →

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You Get To Choose

You get to choose the way you respond to life. In all its mundaneness and glory, you get to choose. This commencement speech to graduates by author David Foster Wallace says it all.

Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a book on personal growth and self accountability that touched my life once upon a time, also spoke of the importance of recognising that each one of us can choose to see the world as though the world evolves around us. Or we can choose to see the world with an understanding that every living person in it is having an experience, which we are not likely to be privy to.

We can choose to judge others, bemoan others and complain that others are to blame for our experiences; ie. we can take a cynical view of the world and of others who share it with us and convince ourselves that others are selfish and out to do what they do at our expense. We can justify our own negativity, lashing out, criticisms, inability to show kindness, you name it. Or we can choose to practice acceptance, and let that be the foundation of resilience. We can choose to practice empathy, without all the details and without knowing the full experience of others. We can simply choose to learn patience and let that sink in as a quality worth having.

I love this. It is a good reminder of how to live in the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpYnxlEh0c