Do you agree with these paradoxical statements?
1. The more badly you want something, the more it becomes something bad for you.
This seems trite, but is worth unpacking. The reason why this happens is because you end up defining yourself by the thing you are chasing. You tell yourself, if I don’t have this, I won’t be complete, or happy. You think you’re elevating your sense of self – ah, I finally have the prize! But in reality, the chase does not elevate but lower – you deceive yourself that your fulfillment can be so cheaply bought by a relationship or accomplishment. Not many things in this world are so good and pure that they are worth defining yourself by reference to them.
2. We seek to become like the people we don’t seek to be with.
This is related to the first point. We chase things – money, status, influence, power, possessions, people. But yet, none of us would design a community to live in that is filled with people who worship exclusively these things. Why does our heart longs for things that make us become the kind of person we do not want to be with?
3. The antidote to fear is not courage, but surrender.
We like to think if we are only brave enough, tough enough, strong enough, we can overcome what we are afraid of. And there is certainly a role for grit, determination and self-belief in this world – to overcome the challenges the world confronts us with. But what if we cannot overcome? Not all battles can be won, but we can reprogram ourselves so that the outcome we fear is not stigmatized in our own minds. We can surrender to the reality that we each have worth and purpose even if what we fear will happen actually happens. Here’s the catch. You must first treat each other people as if they have worth and purpose no matter what happens to them – for if you cannot manifest this in how you view others, you cannot manifest it in how you view yourself.
4. Even if you have nothing, you have much (to give).
For most of my readers this is true: you live good lives in a time of unprecedented comfort and wealth. So I don’t need to work very hard to make a reasonable case that you could be more generous with your graciousness, time and resources. But this is not true of everyone, and it is not true going back through human history. Most of our ancestors scrapped and scraped to survive. But this principle – that the most underrated and untapped human virtue is generosity – was as true for they who were impoverished as it is for us who are not.
If you have money, you can buy stuff to help – but stuff is a double-edged sword (see above).
If you have time, you can volunteer your effort and make a difference – but time is limited, for some more than others.
But even if you have neither money nor time, you can give generously when it comes to forgiving, being kind, listening, seeing, recognizing, appreciating, welcoming, including, praising, thanking, and many other things. We all like when these things are done for us. But we are not very good at doing it for others.
5. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
This is perhaps the most perplexing of all, because 1+1 should not = 3. But it does. If you do the above four things together, you will find that the result of ¼ x 4 is greater than 1. I can’t explain it.
Maybe someone with a PhD in psychology can. I tend to think that it’s because it taps into a deep and rich vein of a profound truth that cannot be explained by the materialistic world.
After all, Aristotle (to whom the saying is attributed) was no fool.
- J
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