By Jane E. Brody — 2019
“Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen,” the author of a new book says.
Read on www.nytimes.com
CLEAR ALL
What people do [when faced with their own death] is to begin looking into their own hearts and into the eyes of those with whom they share their lives. And all too often they find that these aren’t places they’ve looked very deeply before.
We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process.
In McLaren’s view, we typically perceive emotions as problems, which we then thoughtlessly express or repress. She advocates a more mindful approach, where we step back and see our emotions as sources of information.
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I don’t know what happened to emotions in this society. They are the least understood, most maligned, and most ridiculously over-analyzed aspects of human life.
In one school of popular reasoning, people judge historical outcomes that they think are favorable as worthy tradeoffs for historical atrocities. The argument appears in some of the most inappropriate contexts, such as discussions of slavery or the Holocaust.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Our world is in the midst of an emotional meltdown. People are restless, volatile, our tempers about to blow. Why is rage so rampant? What is the solution?
To the list of identities Black people in America have assumed or been asked to, we can now add, thanks to this presidential election season, “Obama’s people” and “the African Americans.”
As I travel around the globe speaking and training, I have consistently found that most people ask me the same question, “How do I discover my purpose in life?”
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For more than 50 years, Ram Dass has watched as other nontraditional spiritual leaders have come and gone while he has remained.