A Minute to Myself (65)
August 29, 2008
Guidance
What is the most important thing that your life has taught you which you would like to pass on? To whom?
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We can't control what people say or do to us, we CAN control how we choose to react to it. Nuff said! That is my claim to fame. Hope things are going better in your little corner of the world. ;)
Posted by: Chris | August 29, 2008 at 05:48 PM
Can you guess? That it's all about balance, of course!
Posted by: April | August 30, 2008 at 01:24 PM
My life lesson would be to trust yourself and give yourself time to question yourself before acting. Maybe that sounds like opposites, but I think we needed to be grounded in our intuition. Would that be a kind of balance? I would like to pass this along to my daughters, and my students, to a generation that is looking for guidance.
Posted by: Laura of Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman | August 30, 2008 at 03:03 PM
I am not on this earth to change anybody or save anybody other than myself.
Posted by: Judith | August 30, 2008 at 05:04 PM
I am not on this earth to change anybody or save anybody other than myself.
Posted by: Judith | August 30, 2008 at 05:04 PM
As a teacher, I guess it would be against our Hippocratic oath to say that I don't want to change anyone. But, maybe it would be more correct, and feasible and proper, to say that I seek to enable children to begin to uncover the things about themselves of which they are proud.
Posted by: Laura of Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman | August 30, 2008 at 06:57 PM
Laura, my feeling is that in an impossible situation such as your's, a foundation is being laid. What it is, I do not know. I copy here the words of Victor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who, even in the depths of humanity, found direction, found light, found hope, and found love:
Frankl: A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory." (from: http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/frankl/frankl.html )
I copy his words here not to G-D forbid compare your situation to his, or visa versa, but rather to perhaps give you some ques to find strength to continue and to blossom, to thrive.
Sincerely,
Avi
Posted by: Avi | September 02, 2008 at 12:42 AM
Avi, thank you so much for that beautiful thought and passage. As I read it I did not think of a beloved, because that, truly, is not something that I have been able to contemplate, but I thought of how everyday I would leave this bitter house and drive to school and stand in front of my classes filled with young teenagers and be spirited and engaging and joking and, perhaps, enlightening. I feel that I was able to find a capacity and need to love in me and my outlet was in interacting with my students. Love. Yes, not to a beloved, but to the beauty that is in each and every one of us (well, most of us).
Combining this thought with the realities of Frankl's Holocaust experiences, perhaps that is why so many people created underground schools, and tried to continue creating art and music and poetry. Is that love both internal and external? And for its fullest expression does it need to see the possibility of fertility, of bloom, of joining onto another?
Posted by: Laura of Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman | September 02, 2008 at 05:34 PM