Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy

So someboday at work posted this on our internal website. I found it amusing, and also an interesting perspective so I thought I'd share it.

Thank You

I’ve been thinking about life the last few days, and it’s made me realize how grateful I am for the many wonderful people in my life.  I have an awesome family and great friends.  You mean so much to me.  So I just wanted to stop for a moment and say,

Thank You!

To Love or to Be Loved

To Love or to Be Loved

“To be, or not to be? That is the question” is just one of the many oft quoted lines of William Shakespeare. While I believe that Shakespeare was one of the greatest wordsmiths of all time, I think he missed the mark a little bit on this particular point.  “The question” really ought to be: to love, or to be loved?

To love, or to be loved? That is the question.  While I do not pretend to be a Shakespeare expert (in fact, I must admit that I have never actually seen Hamlet [which is what the famous “To be, or not to be?” comes from] – which is a shame), as I understand it, he is talking about living or dying, and the injustice that is life.  And yet, had he asked a different question, “To love, or to be loved?” he would have found the answer to the question that he did in fact ask.  For had he asked the question, “To love, or to be loved?” he would have found the secret to happiness and the cure for the injustice of life.

The world would have us think that being loved is far more important than loving.  I would guess that there would be some that would go so far as to say that the only reason to love is to be loved.  Many good people believe that being loved is what brings happiness in our lives.  And they are indeed correct, at least to some extent.  Being loved brings some degree of happiness into our lives.  When we are feeling down, a frequent cause is that we feel like no one cares about us.  We probably even know that there are people that care about us. Yet somehow, even though we know that, we don’t feel it; we still feel like no one cares about us, or we feel that we are alone, or that no one knows how we feel.  Usually such feelings are entirely irrational, but that doesn’t change the way that we feel.

But if we change our outlook and start looking to love rather than being loved, then we would find that no matter what happens, we can still have a joyful life. That doesn’t mean that we don’t experience pain or that our life all of the sudden becomes perfect, but it does become filled with joy, in spite of all the bad things.

Many times we feel depressed because we have answered the question the wrong way: we are looking to be loved rather than to love.  And in fact, by answering the question that way, we can mistakenly then ask Hamlet’s famous question: “to be, or not to be?” instead of the question that we ought to ask, “to love, or to be loved?”

To love.

On Advice and Best Friends

On Advice and Best Friends

Best Friends.  They’re great.  I know that sounds obvious, but it’s true.  There’s just something about them that makes them different.  They always seem to know exactly the right thing to say or do.  I suppose that’s what separates best friends for all other types and classifications of friends.  They just seem to have a way of helping us see things more clearly.  And (at least in my case), its not that my best friend has an elegant way of speaking (I definitely have a much more verbose vernacular than he does) or that he explains things in an unbelievably clear manner.  Rather, something about talking with him makes things seem so much more obvious.  Things that are muddled and confusing in my head seem to become very clear by talking with him.  And interestingly enough, many times he doesn’t even really have to say much at all.  He seems to know the right questions to ask, and I trust him enough to really express what’s on my mind.  And somehow, through the process of me explaining it to him, it all becomes clear.  And then usually to cap it all off, as things are just starting to come into focus for me, he states what, for me, is starting to become obvious and everything just clicks.  And so usually the best part of the advice that I get from him is not from a wealth of wisdom that he shares with me; rather, it is the wisdom I gain by him listening to me.

Its interesting to me that so frequently, the advice that we really need, comes from ourselves when we stop and take the time to reflect so that we can adequately explain to someone else our situation, our predicament, our thoughts, or whatever else it may be.

So next time someone comes to you for advice, maybe the best advice you can give is a listening ear and a few questions that cause them to think and reflect.