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June 17 - August 6, 2020
When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. But this, at least, I believe with all my heart: In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
As I look back, I think probably the factor which influenced me most in my early years was an avid desire, even before I was aware of what I was doing, to experience all I could as deeply as I could.
What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.
Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can grow only as long as we are interested.
What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.
If you can develop this ability to see what you look at, to understand its meaning, to readjust your knowledge to this new information, you can continue to learn and to grow as long as you live and you’ll have a wonderful time doing it.
The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.
The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won’t be shy. Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you. It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you’ll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there’s no
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“If I cannot do it,” they think, “no one will expect me to try.” This particular kind of fear is impoverishing because such a person never dares to find out how much he is really capable of doing.
“You can do anything you have to do,” Louis Howe said firmly. “Get out and try.”
Every time you meet a crisis and live through it, you make it simpler for the next time. If you draw back and say, “I am afraid to do that,” because you might do or say something wrong or you might make a mistake, you will become timid and negative as a person.
Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.
I do feel, though, that you should know in general what you plan to do with your time, what you want to accomplish with it; begin your day at approximately the same hour
Each of us has, as my husband’s rather grim-faced ancestress pointed out, all the time there is. Those years, weeks, hours, are the sands in the glass running swiftly away. To let them drift through our fingers is tragic waste. To use them to the hilt, making them count for something, is the beginning of wisdom.
“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world all of us need both love and charity.”
Actually, an important part of self-knowledge is that it gives one a better realization of the inner strength that can be called upon, of which one may be quite unaware.
There is another ingredient of the maturing process that is almost as painful as accepting your own limitations and the knowledge of what you are unable to give. That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give you. You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it.
So it is a major part of maturity to accept not only your own shortcomings but those of the people you love, and help them not to fail when you can.
When you know you have no justification for self-pity and you want to pity yourself it is much worse than if you have a real grievance.
Intellectual attainments and a developing culture are the road to better and richer living.
HAPPINESS is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.
Don Quixote’s comment, “Until death it is all life.”
I think everyone, from the earliest possible age, should be taught not to be sorry for himself; not, whatever the provocation, whatever the temptation, to carry his depression or his disappointments or his black moods to someone else.
There is loneliness within reach of your outstretched arm; there is unhappiness that requires, perhaps, only understanding and a fortifying word; there is hunger and sickness and despair somewhere in your neighborhood.
Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply to be what is generally called “a success.”
Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.
To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.
Intellectually, one may have known for years that certain needs exist, but until one sees with one’s own eyes and comes to feel with one’s own heart, one will never understand other people.
So the citizen dealing with politicians may find that he has to try a dozen different methods in handling a dozen different people. It is the person who learns best how to do this who has discovered the secret of leadership.
Thomas Jefferson said that individual responsibility for the well-being of the community as a whole was an absolutely necessary ingredient to success in a democracy. Democracy, he pointed out—not being a man to turn away from the unpleasant when it was necessary for people to know the truth—is the most difficult type of government simply because it requires this kind of responsibility.
No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.
Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.’”
