Freedom

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Viktor Frankl

What a powerful quote! and what powerful tool to have, the ability to CHOOSE one’s response and thus, change the course of one’s life and destiny forever! and the others’ around as well…this must be the ultimate freedom, the one that renders the soul its ability to overcome the frailties of body and mind.

Here is an interview with this wonderful human being and psychologist, who taught us so much about the power of play, love, forgiveness and endurance!

Destination

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way in seeing things.

Henry Miller

San Francisco, California. August, 2008

What you do have

To be upset over what you don’t have is to waste what you do have.

Ken Keyes

Establish

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

James Joyce

Love!

 

2 chairs hand in hand in Waynesboro, Virginia, at a friends’ house. August, 2008.

I had this entire post written on the endurance and magnitude of love, beautifully and philosophically written, when just before I wanted to post it, it all went blanc. Call it the moody Monday, that comes after a deboucherous weekend, that does not want to work after my own will.

So, here’s the next best thing:

May you always find someone to share your closest chair with, may you choose your solitude but not your loneliness, and even if that is the case, that you should still find love. In your loved ones, a good friend, your pet or a good book. May you find it in all the unexpected places but mostly in your heart. All day, every day! make it your daily credo and manifesto. To love because it’s your choice, because you can, because it is your ultimate freedom.

Because in truth, nothing and no one can stop you from loving, even though that love may not be reciprocated. Love still, in spite of that. The rewards will come, in ways magnified thousands of times, way beyond your comprehension. Just try! try it for 21 days, or 3o days. Make it your habit :) to just love and give unconditionally to all there is and lives around you. Birds, trees, cars, streets, people, neighbours, cafe shops, work places and coworkers, bosses and exes. Because this capacity it’s in you and to love is a verb, an attitude and an action.

So there you go, you can still love even though you may not be in the perfect relationship, or even with a partner, or with your kids near, or parents, or whatever and whoever else you think you need to love in order to be happy and feel loved back. You are love and love is already within you!

Happy Love Day, every day!

Buds

This story is one for which many people will have to suspend their disbelief. If this wasn’t happening to me, I would be one of those people.

Many won’t struggle to believe it, though, for their minds have been opened; unlocked by whatever kind of key causes people to believe. Those people are either born that way or, as babies, when their minds are like little buds, they are nurtured until their petals slowly open and prepare for the very nature of life to feed them. As the rain falls and the sun shines, they grow, grow, grow; minds so open, they go through life aware and accepting, seeing light where there’s dark, seeing possibility in dead ends, tasting victory as others spit out failure, questioning when others accept. Just a little less jaded, a little less cynical. A little less likely to throw in the towel. Some people’s minds open later in life, through tragedy or triumph. Either key can act as the key to unlatch and lift the lid on that know-it-all box, to accept the unknown, to say goodbye to pragmatism and straight lines.

But then there are those whose minds are merely a bouquet of stalks, which bud as they learn new information – a new bud for a new fact – but yet they never open, never flourish. They are the people of capital letters and full stops, but never of question marks and ellipses…

Cecelia Ahern, ‘The Book of Tomorrow’, Chapter 1. Harper Collins, UK, 2009.

Keep growing. Keep reaching. Keep pushing yourself. Never give up! As long as we’re alive, anything’s possible :)

Shift of focus

Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible for you to do.

Pope John XXIII

Great quote to start the week off! one of the simplest and easiest tools that we have and can push us forward, is the positive shift in our attitude towards what we CAN accomplish with what we already own and what lies in our hands! :)

Be glad

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.

Henry Van Dyke

Poiana Brasov, Romania. July, 2010.

It’s the little things isn’t it? Life truly lies in the little small details we choose to acknowledge every day!

Like the small gestures of kindness from strangers when you are lost and confused in an unknown town, a refreshing cup of coffee in the morning, love’s power that lies in its endurance in spite of everything, to come back again and again in waves and transcend our lives, our perception and consciousness if we let it…the smile of someone who sees you on the street and feels happy to encounter you, music that can uplift you and give wings to your feelings, that can so simply unite people in one maddening embrace during a dance…and many many more instances that so clearly tell us that Life IS  simple, Life is Celebration and Light!

And the moment to choose to live it is NOW! and yes, it does have its dark paths and trials, but aren’t those emphasizing the Life’s power and light even more? :)

Decisive element

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.  It is my personal approach that creates the climate.  It is my daily mood that makes the weather.  I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.  In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.  If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Focus on…

Focusing on what we already have and being grateful for right now is one of the most powerful things we can do to alter our life in a positive way.

Mike Robbins