All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You’ve got to find it on your own terms.
A quick quote from David Suzuki, writing last week in Metro Ottawa:
You must stand up for what you believe in, but be prepared for people to be angry and to disagree. If you want to be liked by everyone, then you will stand for nothing.
This is a message about integrity. We don’t have to be cruel about expressing our beliefs - it’s not “us” against “them” - but our actions must reflect our beliefs if we are to maintain our integrity. People who suspend their beliefs and who act in opposition to them are rarely very happy.
A paragraph in National Geographic Adventure caught my attention. This is a tale of leaving the Big Apple to carve out a life in very rural - and isolated - Vermont.
At night, lying in bed with the windows open and ticking off our list of problems, we’d hear a barred owl hooting –”Who cooks for you?”–and be struck by the small scale of our worries. Were we to fade away, Cathy said, that owl would be here anyway, keeping someone else awake with its questioning call, questioning nothing.
Yes, our problems are pretty small. They just seem big because they are happening to us. Sometimes it takes the big wide world to put our challenges into perspective.
People call me an optimist, but I’m really an appreciator….When I
was six years old and had scarlet fever, the first of the miracle
drugs, sulfanilamide, saved my life. I’m grateful for computers and
photocopiers…I appreciate where we’ve come from.
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