Wisdom for Life

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are. 

So I suppose the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you developed an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast while in the shower.

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger. 

Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present. 

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. 

Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you would have spent on beers in a bar and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Tutor a seventh-grader. 

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough. 

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live. 

[…] This is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. 

-A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlin via Brainpicker.

I have been dwelling on these words all week. They sound so simple on paper but can become such a challenge to seek and maintain in order to live by. Perhaps the goal is less to achieve this awareness but simply to try (and sometimes to fight) to realize more of this each and every day. It is so easy to get lost in the busyness of life that I need constant reminders to choose to be present and teach myself how to fully live these moments. Hope this serves as a reminder for you, too.