A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against, and what I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff, so that when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it based on having working with loving-kindness on yourself.
We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestations of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
-Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
In cultivating loving-kindness, we train first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves. Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness. Sometimes we feel good and strong. Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak. But our loving-kindness is unconditional. No matter how we feel, we can aspire to be happy. We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress. Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.
God loved the world so much that he gave his son and he gave him to a virgin, the blessed virgin Mary, and she, the moment he came in her life, went in haste to give him to others. And what did she do then? She did the work of the handmaid, just so. Just spread that joy of loving to service. And Jesus Christ loved you and loved me and he gave his life for us, and as if that was not enough for him, he kept on saying: Love as I have loved you, as I love you now, and how do we have to love, to love in the giving. For he gave his life for us. And he keeps on giving, and he keeps on giving right here everywhere in our own lives and in the lives of others.
It was not enough for him to die for us, he wanted that we loved one another, that we see him in each other, that’s why he said: Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.
-Mother Teresa, from her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.
-Cornell West, as lifted from here
Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.
-Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1998
We seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them. The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves. For intractable nature is both around and within us. The exasperating "life" which is at once loveable and perishable, pleasant and painful, a blessing and a curse, is also the life or our own bodies.
-Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Bob [Knight] was well-known for his fiery temper. And he had an intense, imposing demeanor that made him seem very intimidating. But over the years, I found a way to cut through all that. If I wanted to stop him in his tracks, I just had to say, "Hey, Coach, I just want you to know one thing. I love you, man. You changed my life."
That would melt him right down. As it does most people. I've learned that it's hard for people, especially males, to tell other people, "I love you." Even with my own son, for most of his early years, I noticed it was uncomfortable for him to say "I love you," back to me. It's strange because each and every one of us has a thirst to be loved, to be appreciated, acknowledged, respected. And yet, for some reason, there's a difficulty or discomfort in expressing to others, "I love you." "I appreciate you." "I respect you." "I'm glad you're my friend." "I know we have our differences, but I'm here for you."
I think we would be surprised by how few people regularly hear these kinds of things. I would wager that over half of the young people in America go to bed every night without hearing a single affirming word.
-George Raveling, What You're Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports
There are many elements of living a good life, but the first and most foundational is to love yourself and enjoy spending time with yourself.
Go do things on your own so you learn to trust your mind and view it as a welcome companion. If someone declared, “Tomorrow you must spend the day alone” the hope is that you would reply, “That sounds like a good day!”
The person who is at ease within finds every other space larger and more enjoyable.
James Clear, from this edition
It's like the greatest painting in the modern world, which is Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son. The story's in place. All the conflict and tension are there, but the narrative was in place. Rembrandt can take that for granted. Mennonites, Jews, and others there in the Netherlands all connect to this particular way of understanding human dignity at its deepest level. You go beyond Christianity, beyond Judaism, just human and raw, and le lays it out right before he dies, lays it down. Now jump to our period where, existentially, we got so much conformity, complacency, and cowardliness being rewarded that courage, they squeeze out. Now courage is the enabling virtue of all other virtues—all of them. So, even we Christians, okay, we got faith, we got hope, and the greatest of these, love. But where's courage?
None of them work without courage. You can't love without courage. God can't use cowards. You can't sustain your faith without courage.
-Cornel West, as excerpted from Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division by Robert P. George and Cornel West
Loving others requires knowing how to say “yes.”
Loving yourself requires knowing when to say “no.”
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
-Robert Frost, as he concludes Two Tramps In Mud Time
When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy between two policemen, Robbie waited in the long dreary corridor, that before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as handcuffed and with a bowed head I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek.
-Welty/Sharp, The Norton Book of Friendship, Oscar Wilde from De Profundis
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