The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Reading

I'm back from my trip with friends and I've been enjoying catching up on some reading. So I figured I'd share some of my favorite articles. At first, I thought they were all unrelated but after I thought about it, they're all connected in certain ways.

The 'Busy' Trap
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day... I can't help but wonder whether all this historic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.

Redefining Success and Celebrating the Unremarkable
"In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another - which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality - we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement," he told the students and parents.

"You make a lot of money or have athletic success. That's a very, very narrow definition. What about being compassionate and living a life of integrity?"

How do we go back to the idea that ordinary can be extraordinary? How do we teach our children - and remind ourselves - that life doesn't have to be all about public recognition and prizes, but can be more about our relationships and special moments?

Vacation Sabotage - Don't Let It Happen to You!

Oh Glory by the wonderful Hayley Williams

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