As if we do not...

...have enough to test and try in our daily lives, we have our own imaginations to contend with. These ensure that we can never fully relax. Always, there is something to be nervous of. No matter what the scenario, we are capable of conjuring up negative associations. Or of seeing within it a pessimistic possibility.

Worse, our imagination will often insist that it is not even talking to us - that it is, in fact, the voice of common sense.

Reason is not measured by size or height, but by principle.   (Epicetus)

I've absolutely no idea...

....how many adults there are in the world, but you can be sure that for every adult there is a closet. Those closets all have skeletons in them. Those skeletons, though, have long since lost most of their identifying features. They are not very interesting. The only power they possess is the ability to seem slightly shocking when you first open the cupboard door and they leap out at you from the dark. 

Shine any kind of a light on them for any length of time and they soon become a pile of boring old bones, relics fit for nothing.

Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits

Let bygones be bygones....

.....Life's too short for rancour and recrimination. Build bridges, don't burn them. Reach out the hand of reconciliation. Let loose the white dove of peace and tolerance. Be big-hearted and generous. And look a little more forgivingly at that person in the mirror, after all, there but for the grace of God goes you! 

Things happen from time to time, we have to learn from them and move on.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain; but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving  (Dale Carnegie)

If we all want peace....

....and understanding, how come we all spend so much time arguing and failing to comprehend why the other people in our world can be so utterly unreasonable and inconsiderate? Serenity is not something we can buy from a supermarket; it is something we have to develop within ourselves.

There are no shops that give out 'tolerance tokens' for us to cash in at times of great need. We create our own... or we live without it and suffer the stress.


If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.    (Mother Teresa)

Imagine eating one meal....

....and then never needing to eat again for the rest of your life. Or getting one good night's sleep and then staying awake forever and a day because you have now fulfilled your need to slip into unconsciousness. There are some things that we just have to keep on doing over and over again.

By and large, though, only the pleasurable activities need to be repeated. If a positive pattern is playing itself out in your life now, enjoy it. If, though, there's a sense of 'uh-oh, here we go again', break the habit.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them  (James A Baldwin)

There's love and there's love...

....Relationships, by and large, involve conditional love. No matter how much one person loves another, they can usually bring themselves to stop if the other person behaves badly enough. A particularly tolerant soul may forgive more... but the kind of love that flows between two people, wonderful though it may be, is not the kind of love that makes the world go round.

That's love for life itself.

Great relationships aren't built in a day.  Great relationships are built daily.

I was made aware of this quite recently....

.....In some cultural traditions, buildings are deliberately left unfinished. Even if the entire structure is an intricate work of art, one little section is kept incomplete. This is a spiritual gesture, an acknowledgement of the idea that there's always room for improvement!

   

Nothing is ever as good as it can get. When we claim to have it all or pretend that we have solved all our problems, we are kidding ourselves. To be human is to wrestle with incompatible urges. Something in your world may be far from complete. Yet that doesn't mean it isn't still perfect in its own way.

Be as you wish to seem.   (Socrates)