Life Lessons

There are dreams of love, life, and adventure in all of us. But we are also sadly filled with reasons why we shouldn’t try. These reasons seem to protect us, but in truth they imprison us. They hold life at a distance. Life will be over sooner than we think. If we have bikes to ride and people to love, now is the time

It’s amazing how much more we live by what we should do than by what we want to do.

Once in a while, give in to an urge you would usually suppress, try doing something “odd” or new. You may learn something about who you are

We often look to others to define us. If others are in a bad mood, we are brought down. If others see us as being wrong, we become defensive. But who we are is beyond attack and defense. We are whole, complete, and of worth just as we are, whether we are rich or poor, old or young, receiving an Olympic gold medal, or beginning or ending a relationship. Whether at the beginning or the end of life, at the height of fame or in the depths of despair, we are always the people behind our circumstances. You are what you are, not your disease, not what you do. Life is about being, not doing.

Most of us have not committed criminal acts, but we do have to work through the darker parts of our personalities. Black and white are apparent; it’s those gray parts that we often hide and deny: the “nice” guy, the isolator, the victim, and the martyr. These are the gray parts of our shadow self. We can’t work on the deep negativity if we can’t admit that we have negative sides. If we acknowledge all of our feelings, we can become our whole selves.

Throughout my life, as I’ve learned to be my real self, I’ve developed a knack for recognizing others who are authentically themselves. I call it sniffing someone out. You don’t smell with your nose, you smell with all your senses if someone is real or not. I’ve learned to sniff people when I meet them and if they smell real, I give them a signal to come close. If not, I give them a signal to go away. In working with the dying you develop a keen sense of smell for authenticity

Sometimes when I would sit in my father’s lap, I knew he did not know which one I was. Can you imagine what this does to your identity? Now we know how important it is to recognize the individual, to recognize how different each of us is. These days, when multiple births have become routine, parents have learned not to dress and treat their kids alike.

I have always tried to be myself, even when being myself may have not been the most popular choice. I don’t believe in being a phony-baloney for any reason

Sometimes we consciously or unwittingly adopt new roles as circumstances change and are hurt by the result. For instance, a couple may say, “It was so wonderful before we got married. Once we were married, something went wrong.” When the couple was together before, they were just being. The moment they got married they took on the roles that had been taught to them, trying to “be a husband” and “be a wife.” On some subconscious level they “knew” what a husband or wife should be like and tried to act accordingly instead of being themselves and discovering what kind of spouses they wanted to be.

Or, as one man explained, “I was such a great uncle, now I feel so disappointed in the father I’ve become.” As an uncle, he interacted with children from his heart. When he became a father, he felt he had a specific role to assume, but that role got in the way of his being who he is, authentically himself.

So is the great person already inside of you ready to be revealed. Everyone carries the seeds of greatness. “Great” people don’t have something that everyone else doesn’t; they’ve simply removed a lot of the things that stand in the way of their best selves.