Life Wisdom

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who says, “last night, the channel was full of starfish.” And you wonder, is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the pond, where whole generations of biological processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds speak to you of the natural world: they whisper, they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old enough to appreciate the moment? Too old? There is movement beneath the water, but it may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the years you ran around, the years you developed a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon, owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have become. And then life lets you go home to think about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one who never had any conditions, the one who waited you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave, so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you were born at a good time. Because you were able to listen when people spoke to you. Because you stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland, while outside, the starfish drift through the channel, with smiles on their starry faces as they head out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

-Eleanor Lerman

This is your Life.  Do what you love, and do it often.
If you don’t like something change it.
If you don’t like your job, quit.
If you don’t have enough time, stop watching tv.
If you are looking for the love of your life, stop.

They will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.
Stop over analyzing, all emotions are beautiful.
When you eat, appreciate every last bite.
Life is simple. Open your mind, arms and heart to new things and people.

We are united in our differences.
Ask the next person you see what their passion is, and share your inspiring dream with them.
Travel often, getting lost will help you find yourself.
Some opportunities only come once, seize them.

Life is about the people you meet, and the things you create with them so go out and start creating.
Life is short. Live your dreams and share your passion.

-Mike, Fabian and Dave Holstee

There was once a man who stood before God, his heart breaking from the pain and injustice in the world. “Dear God,” he cried out, “look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in your world. Why don’t you send help?” God responded, “I did, I sent you.”

-Rabbi David J. Wolpe

It is so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know our way. We like to have maps. We like to have guides. But we are more like breathing puzzles, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit. Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we begin to understand our place in the world.

-Mark Nepo

Where there is hatred, may we bring love.
I am committed to being appreciative and grateful for all the gifts that I have.
Where there is pain, may we bring healing.
I am committed to enhancing my life by perceiving the good in each event.
Where there is darkness, may we bring healing.
I am committed to viewing today as a new challenge and adventure.
Where there is despair, may we bring hope.
I am committed to keeping my goals in mind and to enjoying the process of reaching them.
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.
I am committed to acting with kindness and compassion in all situations that arise.
Where there is strife, may we bring peace.
I am committed to beginning again now at any given moment.
Make this a better world and begin with us.

-Rabbi Zelig Pliskin

When Hayyim of Zanz was a young man, he set about trying to reform his country from its evil ways. But when he reached the age of thirty, he looked around and saw that evil remained in the world. So he said, “Perhaps I was too ambitious. I will begin with my province.” But at the age of forty, his province too remained mired in evil. So he said, “I was still too ambitious. From now on I will only try to lift up my community.” But at fifty, he saw that his community had still not changed. So he decided only to reform his own family. But when he looked around, he saw that his family had grown and moved away, and now he remained alone. “Now I understand that I needed to begin with myself.” So he spent the rest of his life perfecting his own soul.

-Author Unknown

How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straightaway. And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!

-Anne Frank

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them and the point is, to love everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not imagine that character is determined at birth. We have been given free will. Any person can become as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jeroboam. We ourselves learned or ignorant, compassionate or cruel, generous or miserly. No one forces us, no one decides for us, no one drags us along one path or another. We, ourselves, by our own volition, choose our own way!

-Moses Maimonides

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had 3 months to write. It was due the next day.

We were out at our family cabin, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by a binder, paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

-Anne Lamott

There are two basic motivating forces, fear and love.
When we are afraid, we pull back from life.
When we are in love, we open to all the life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.
We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections.
If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create.
Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

-John Lennon

To open eyes when others close them. To hear when others do not wish to listen. To look when others turn away. To seek to understand when others give up. To rouse oneself when others accept. To continue the struggle even when one is not the strongest. To cry out when others keep silent. To be a Jew it is that. It is first of all that. And further, to live when others are dead and to remember when others have forgotten.

-Emmanuel Eydoux

• Don’t promise when you’re happy. Don’t reply when you’re angry and don’t decide when you’re sad.
  -Ziad K. Abdelhour
• It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
  -E.E. Cummings
• Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you or makes you happy.
  -Robert Tew
• No matter how much you revisit the past, there’s nothing new to see.
  -Robert Tew
• The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
  -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth, but that’s all.
  -Cheryl Strayed
• You will learn a lot from yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
  -Cheryl Strayed
• You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history, economics, science or the arts.
  -Cheryl Strayed
• In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.
  -Andrea Dykstra
• When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t.
  -Louis C.K.
• These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.
  -Najwa Zebian
• Your worst battle is between what you know and what you feel.
  -Alex Haditaghi
• Sometimes the bad things that happen in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us.
  -Nicole Reed
• There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
  -Albert Einstein
• Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.
  -Golda Meir
• I struggle so deeply to understand how someone can pour their entire soul, blood, and energy into someone without wanting anything in return.
  -Rupi Kaur
• Of course I want to be successful, but I don’t crave success for me. I need to be successful to gain enough milk and honey to help those around me succeed.
  -Rupi Kaur
• If you were born with the weakness to fall, you were born with the strength to rise.
  -Rupi Kaur
• The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent. The day he forgives them, he becomes an adult. The day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.
  -Aidan Nowlan
• If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I, and if not now, when?
  -Author Unknown
• Learning, learning, learning. That is the secret of Jewish survival.
  -Author Unknown
• Whoever teaches his son teaches not alone his son, but also his son’s son, and so on to the end of generations.
  -Author Unknown