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On The Relationship Between Failure, Humility And Wisdom

Humility in response to an experience of failure, then, is at its core a form of therapy, the beginning of a healing process. -- Costica Bradatan

Failure is like the original sin in the biblical narrative: everyone has it. Regardless of class, caste, race, or gender, we are all born to fail, we practise failure for as long as we live, and pass it on to others. Just like sin, failure can be disgraceful, shameful and embarrassing to admit. And did I mention ‘ugly’? Failure is also ugly – ugly as sin, as they say. For all its universality, however, failure is under-studied, when not simply neglected. It’s as if even the idea of looking at failure more closely makes us uneasy; we don’t want to touch it for fear of contagion.

Studying failure can be a contorted, Janus-headed exercise, though. With one pair of eyes we have to look into ourselves (for ‘moral’ or ‘cognitive’ failures, for failures of ‘judgment’ or ‘memory’), and with another pair we need to dwell on instances of failure ‘out there’, in the world around us. Fascinating as the former can be, let me focus here on the latter: the failure we experience in our dealings with the world.

Picture yourself in an airliner, at high altitude. One of the plane engines has just caught fire, the other doesn’t look very well either, and the pilot has to make an emergency landing. Finding yourself in such a situation can be a shattering, yet also a revealing experience. First, there are of course the cries, the tears, the whispered prayers, the loud hysterics. Amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you cannot think of anything in any detached, rational fashion. For you have to admit it, you are scared to death, just like everyone else. Yet the plane lands safely and everybody gets off unharmed. After you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together, you start thinking a bit more clearly about what just happened.

That’s when we might realise, for example, how close we can be sometimes to not being at all. And also that there is something oppressively materialistic, to an almost obscene degree, in any ‘brush with death’. Some faulty piece of equipment – a worn-out part, a loose screw, a leaking pipe, anything – could be enough to do us in. That’s all it takes. We thus realise that, when we experience failure, we start seeing the cracks in the fabric of existence, and the nothingness that stares at us from the other side. Yet even as failure pushes us towards the margins of existence it gives us the chance to look at everything – at the world, at ourselves, at what we value most – with fresh eyes. The failure of things, coming as it does with a certain measure of existential threat, exposes us for what we are. And what a sight!

From that unique location – the site of devastation that we’ve become – we understand that we are no grander than the rest of the world. Indeed, we are less than most things. The smallest stone we pick up randomly from a riverbed has long preceded us, and will outlive us. Humans are barely existing entities: how can we claim privileges? Fundamentally, we are vulnerable, fragile creatures. And if, unlike the rest of existence, people are endowed with reason, it is this gift of reason that should lead us to understand how modest our place in the cosmos actually is.

The experience of failure, then, ought to inculcate humility. Rather than a virtue in the narrow sense, humility should be seen, more broadly, as a certain type of insertion into the world, as a way of life. In The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Iris Murdoch came up with one of the best, most economical definitions of humility, which is simply ‘selfless respect for reality’. She thinks that ordinarily people suffer from a poor adjustment to reality (‘our picture of ourselves has become too grand’, we have lost ‘the vision of a reality separate from ourselves’), and it’s one that harms us, above anything else. To reverse the process, to heal, it helps to learn humility, ‘the most difficult and central of all virtues’.

I see three major phases here.

In a first movement, humility presupposes an acknowledgment of our cosmic insignificance. This is something as old as philosophising itself; it is what Yahweh wanted to instill in Job when he asked him: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?’ and what the Stoics meant when they recommended ‘the view from above’; what Lady Philosophy sought to teach a terrified-to-death Boethius in his prison cell; or what, more recently, Carl Sagan popularised so well. Embracing our cosmic insignificance is the zero-degree of the human existence – lower than this we cannot go. At this stage, shattered by failure and overwhelmed by the realisation of our fundamental precariousness, we rightly feel ‘crushed’, ‘flattened’, ‘reduced to dust’. Humility, thus, places us where we belong; we are brought back to our naked condition. But this is no small feat: for along with the sense of our own self-importance, we also manage to get rid of that mix of self-deceiving habits and self-flattery, which usually keep us hidden from ourselves.

In a second movement, we realise that, thanks precisely to our being brought ‘to earth’, we are in fact in a better position because we are finally on firm ground. We can now stand on our own feet – we’ve undergone a rebirth of sorts. Importantly, we also realise that there is no degradation at this stage because, by embracing our cosmic insignificance, we’ve come to be true to ourselves. We may be poor, but we are frightfully honest – especially with ourselves. And that’s always the best place to start; wherever we will go from here, it will be progress and a worthwhile journey. Not to say that there is nothing healthier and more refreshing, especially for minds all too frequently pulled up in the air by the force of their own fantasies, than to be drawn back down to earth once in a while. Hardened dreamers undertaking the mud cure are in for a feast.

The third movement is expansive: thanks to having lowered an anchor into the world and regained an existential equilibrium, we can move on to other, bigger things. The dreams now have the necessary ballast to be dreamt properly. At this stage, humility is no longer an impediment, but an enhancement to action; sometimes there is nothing more daring than the act of the humble. In an important sense, then, humility is the opposite of humiliation: there is nothing demeaning or inglorious about it; on the contrary, humility is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening. If humiliation leaves us paralysed and powerless, humility empowers us greatly. True humility, wrote the rabbi Jonathan Sacks, ‘is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues’. What it presupposes is not ‘undervaluing yourself’ but an ‘openness to life’s grandeur’.

Humility in response to an experience of failure, then, is at its core a form of therapy, the beginning of a healing process. Properly digested, failure can be a medicine against pretentiousness, arrogance and hubris. It can get us cured, should we care to try it.

                                                                      

Costica Bradatan is associate professor of humanities at Texas Tech University and honorary research associate professor of philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author, most recently, of Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (2015), and is currently working on a new book, In Praise of Failure, for Harvard University Press.

Be The Change: Look back at a time you felt you failed at something, and investigate how much you learned from the attempt, knowledge that is perhaps very useful to you now. And next time your reach exceeds your grasp, congratulate yourself on having reached as far as you could.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Friendly Gestures

17 Friendly Gestures That Create Good Karma

When we create good karma in our lives today, we create more happiness and fulfilment for our futures tomorrow.

Karma is a universal law that affects everyone, all of the time.  It is the consequence of our actions.  Karma brings back to us what we are putting out into the universe, be it love, hate, humor, sadness, stress, excitement or anything else we chose to project.

Like the ripples in a pond that radiate out from a pebble dropping into the water, karma pulses out after each of our actions and choices, and it affects the future unfolding in front of us.

Offering kindness to others is a wonderful way to bring happiness to others, and it is also a way to create good karma in our own lives.  When we put kindness and love out into the world, the after-effects of these choices bring more kindness and love into tomorrow’s reality.  For this reason, offering a friendly gesture to another person is an action that is always worth the effort!

Here are a few friendly gestures that create good karma.  How many of these actions are a part of your daily routine?

1. Smile at people throughout the day.

2. Be patient with others.

3. Give a hug to someone you care about.

4. Pat someone on the back.

5. Offer a handshake.

6. Open a door for someone else.

7. Let a car in ahead of you while in traffic.

8. Use the words “please” and “thank you” habitually.

9. Share your knowledge and skills with others.

10. Be interested in what others have to say (ask questions, listen, etc).

11. Own up to any mistakes you make, and offer genuine apologies.

12. Give compliments freely.

13. Stop to ask someone “are you ok?” when they look distressed.

14. Help someone who looks lost or overwhelmed.

15. Stick up for someone who’s being made fun of or treated poorly.

16. Forgive people for their mistakes.

17. Focus on the good in others.

Which of these friendly gestures do you use the most in your day-to-day life?  Are there any other friendly gestures you would recommend for building good karma?  

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What Matters Most?

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion. -- Maya Angelou

What Matters Most?

How often do we take time to reevaluate the life programs we set for ourselves or the ones that somehow gradually took us over? My Mother, an early student of G. I. Gurdjieff, helped many people move toward their deepest desires by interrupting their usual busyness, asking, “But what do you really want?”

It’s a stop-you-in-your-tracks question that can shake us awake when we become mesmerized by the effort to deal with whatever’s coming next. And we really need to ask it because mostly, although we may have a far-off mountaintop of a wish in our hearts, we remain snagged in the-day to-day demands of our lives, engaged in just trying to make it through the next few hours. Whenever we let “What do I really want?” into awareness, we are invited to fall back and regroup around another, more significant urgency — the call of the heart

I was stopped in my tracks recently by some advice from James Hollis: “Do not perpetuate what is already outlived,” he writes. “…What once provided protection is now restrictive.” Bingo! Here I was, hanging onto the need that’s been with me since childhood to prove myself again and again, when I’m already established in what interests me. I don’t need to hustle for success in the eyes of the world. Yet life’s superficial demands were drawing me on in ways that no longer affirm my heartfelt interests. It was time to ask why. What’s more, to hang onto past drives, to be stuck in my usual ways, contradicts the real person I am beginning to be.

If such a question challenges your interest, but you aren’t quite sure what to do about it, here are some experiments you can make

1. At the end of the day, ask yourself what were you doing when you felt good. And when did you feel tired or bored? Then take the time to ask yourself, “What do I truly value?” The answer, which could change your life, may appear like a bolt from the blue, or take a few days of wondering and self-query. However, once you have brought into focus something you really care about, make it a priority in your life.

2. But if you have difficulty finding your Real Wish, you might try an exercise Gurdjieff gave one of his groups. Sit still for at least half an hour, silent, without moving, holding this question in your heart. Then write down on a piece of paper what immediately comes to mind. Put that paper in your pocket and take it wherever you go that day. Look at it often.

3. Notice during the next day, and write down in a notebook, exactly how much time you give to what you really value. A few minutes here? An hour there? No time for it today? In the evening you might ponder why it has such a small place in your day and resolve to give it a little more time. Beware super-efforts. We give them up too easily. Just allow ten or fifteen minutes more for your True Desire, then build on it as your wish becomes more grounded in reality and you become more needy to spend time in that way.

4. Another way to affirm a new direction is to interrupt yourself at unexpected times. Gurdjieff suggested we set alarm clocks to wake us up from sleepwalking through our day, letting life happen to us without really living it. For example, when I sit down at the computer I get so engrossed in what I’m writing that I completely forget I have a body. But because I’m dedicated to staying present to my body/mind and opening to the world I live in, I set an egg timer to ring every so often, as a signal to get up and stretch or walk to the window and see what’s happening in the world beyond me.

5. Gradually you will find it easier to devote time to what you really want to do or how you want to be. Habits are always hardest to change at first and you are creating a new habit, dedicated to what matters most to you. To honor it, you might find a place in your house or apartment where you could pay more attention to this other side of yourself. You could store there whatever books or journals or tools or paints that are a part of this other newly-hatched life of yours. Put on the music that you love most. Light a candle and offer a prayer to Mercury, the god of changes or Janus, the god of gates and doorways, who knows how to look in two directions at once.

Be The Change: Try to set aside some time each day - no matter how busy you may be - to give yourself a chance to reflect and think about what matters most to yourself.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

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Buried Treasure: The Story Of A Marriage

You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter. --Eckart Tolle

Buried Treasure: The Story of a Marriage

--by Carolyn North, syndicated from carolynnorthbooks.com, Sep 14, 2016

Last night I saw a swashbuckling production of TREASURE ISLAND, that wild tale of adventure on the high seas and mayhem on tropical islands with buried treasure, and good guys and bad guys mixing it up with every mishap in the world you could imagine.

It reminded me a bit of my marriage.

It has been a year and a half since Herb died, and all the ups and down, triumphs and tragedies of our long life together are peeling off me one by one, as I remember and let go, releasing him bit by bit as I grieve and heal from the loss of the half-century journey we took together. It feels like removing petals from a daisy, or an artichoke one by one down to the heart, where, surrounded by yet one more protective choke of thistle, lies the delicious heart that distills the taste of the whole plant.

So, I’m there and almost ready to take that last bite of the heart of the fruit.

Like most marriages, I guess, we were a mixed bag of personality differences, varied preferences, unexamined childhood traumas, weaknesses and strengths, hopes and passions. I think he and I partnered each other with as much love and courage as we could, making every mistake in the book on a daily basis but trying to learn from them and carry on. We, with our children, were a brave but merry little band most of the time, and laughter graced our dinner table nightly. (With dinner in our bellies, we were a fabulously witty bunch!) 

Though I wish I had done many things differently over the years, and known then what I know now, I have no real regrets.

However, all that is water under the bridge, as they say – washed away into past history with my tears and memories and stories – and what is left is the deeper essence that, I believe, brought us together in the first place.

I think of our marriage, now, as mythic. 

Herb, the budding scientist, serious and smart, wounded from the Holocaust in childhood and determined to succeed in his new world, and Carolyn, the mystical, impractical artist-type with a crazy Russian family and a tender heart. It was as if we had found each other across space and time, speaking different languages but determined to try understanding one another anyhow.

It is that that I contemplate now as I look back over the years at who we were and what we accomplished, and I realize it was a big piece of mutual soul work we were doing.  We were attempting to complete ourselves with one another, to find a common frame that combined the rational and the intuitive, suspecting that a true understanding of the world included both. 

We knew that we both wished for a Wholeness we could not attain on our own, and we both wished to do it with love.

Of course there were times when, frustrated down to my bones and thinking he would never get it, I was ready to pack a bag and leave. (Herb claimed he never once thought to leave.) But then I would simmer down, realizing that if he and I – two people who loved each other - couldn’t find a way of communicating what we saw without fighting over it, then how could we expect the rest of the world to do so? We were not just ‘us,’ we were also representatives of our two mindsets, with a responsibility to make this experiment work.

Slowly, over the years, we both softened our stances to make room for the other’s reality, feeling for, and finding the places where our perceptions could resonate with the other’s frame of reference.

I learned to listen closely, and shift my mind into hard ‘facts’ lined up in a logical argument, recognizing the clarity and beauty of keeping things simple, and he cautiously spread his perceptions into my more amorphous direction, writing poetry and feeling his way towards unexpected synchronicities. 

His joke was that as a scientist at the University he was considered a radical amongst his colleagues, but when he came home he was the conservative in the family. He called me a witch when magic happened around me, but learned to admire whatever it was that made magic happen; I, of course, depended upon his expertise to keep everything running, from the finances to the plumbing. 

We were a team – a damn good team with a good long run. 

But it went deeper than that – quite a bit deeper – and that is what I am contemplating now. What, I believe, we all need to be contemplating in one way or another.

It has to do with letting go of the arguments, of having to be ‘right’ about everything while making other points of view ‘wrong.’ It’s about listening for where varied wisdoms touch, even when the language is different.

 It’s about letting go of either/or thinking and finding the pathways towards both/and understandings. 

And doing so calmly, with love.

On Herb’s last night I sat with him while he slept, his breathing slowing, his face calm and inward looking. We had said everything we needed to say to each other in this life, we had maintained our friendship and humor even through the worst of his last few weeks – doing every last moment together, no matter what. 

I was beyond exhaustion, and he was ready to go.

Alone in the room with him when he breathed his last breath, I was quite surprised to hear myself exclaim out loud,

“We did it!”

And knew I was referring to all 58 years of our marriage.

---

This article is reprinted with permission. Carolyn North writes about Consciousness Change, about storytelling as a kickstarter to creativity. Her forms are autobiographical stories, mythology retellings, and how-to books. Learn more at her website. 

Be The Change: Reflect on a close relationship in your life, and what treasures of wisdom and transformation are buried beneath its surface.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Perseverance Is Willingness, Not Will

If we could surrender to Earth's intelligence, we would rise up rooted, like trees. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Determination – Tracy Cochran

One day recently I woke up with no voice, just a breathy whisper. This is challenging under ordinary circumstances. But on this particular day it felt like catastrophe. I was scheduled to teach mindfulness meditation and give a talk at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. Still under the covers, I tried talking. Nothing, just air rushing out no matter how hard I pushed to make my vocal chords work.

Terrible images flashed before my eyes; faces looking up at me with dismay and incomprehension, people stampeding for the exits. Fear has a mind of its own. I am shy under the best of circumstances. Preparing for public speaking can feel like suiting up for battle. But in recent years, I have also developed Spasmodic Dysphonia, a rare voice disorder that can make my voice wax and wane. On good days, this can give my voice an interesting, husky quality. The last time I led meditation at the Rubin, someone said I sounded like the sultry movie star Anne Bancroft.

People have actually asked how long it took me to develop this gravelly, smoky voice, finding it soothing for meditation, maybe picturing lots of whisky and cigarettes. Yet on bad days, just before and after treatment, the voice is breathy and strangled. It is as if you are in one of those movies where you can see and hear people but they can’t see or hear you, as if you are a ghost or a captive whose shouts can’t be heard. In a culture in which words are everything, to be voiceless is also to be invisible. I also felt strangely defenseless.

“I can’t go on,” writes Samuel Beckett. “I’ll go on.” Naturally, I thought of cancelling. But the Rubin Museum event was long scheduled, and it was about something more than my sitting up on a stage talking and being entertaining. The weekly mindfulness meditation sessions at the Rubin offer people to sit and meditate surrounded by sacred art in the middle of the big city. Who was I to cancel? Besides, I was supposed to be talking about determination and perseverance. I decided I had show up. Even if I couldn’t be heard at all, I would show determination.

When most of us think of determination, we think first of imposing our will on the world, insisting on a particular outcome, our vision. Yet real determination appears when we keep going, surrendering what the ego wants, which is always to look good, to sound good, to win. Real perseverance is willingness, not will. Really determined people are willing to give up what the ego wants and to go on, no matter what is going on around them. Persevering does not mean being rigid and fixed, but flowing like water, willing to meet the conditions at hand yet never giving up.

I boarded the train, headed for a true unknown. Naturally, at times I was gripped with uncertainty. In those moments, I discovered how fear narrows the focus. When I shifted my attention away from my thoughts and projections about others to my own experience in the moment, my tunnel vision broadened and softened. My view became more generous. By myself on the train, practicing without witnesses, I experienced how giving space and acceptance to my fear brought courage and grounded me.

Things happen all the time in this world that can make you feel as if the ground is giving way beneath your feet. Things that you think are solid and unchanging are not. The body that seemed so reliable, the relationship you thought would last for life, the narrative about your life you took to be reality, everything is subject to change. What can we trust in such a world? It turns out we can trust our deeper wish to wake up and see just this. It turns out that at under the ego there is an earthier essence that wishes to be part of a larger world. Touching this earth allows us to open and be more aware.

At the Rubin I was met by kindness. A cup of tea was fetched. A powerful hand microphone was supplied. After the introduction, as I mounted the steps to the stage and took my seat, I kept the focus of attention on yourself that you can be selfless, only by focus on what is happening inside and outside you that you can be generous…practicing without witnesses, by giving space and acceptance to your fear, your grasping, your anger, you can be free to help others.

I encouraged people to use my breathy voice to listen as if the speaker was on her deathbed and about to impart the secret of life. The secret wasn’t in me but in the listening. The more closely we listen, the more we hear, especially the wordless aspiration and knowing in ourselves. All but one person stayed. Afterwards, more than one person assured me they could hear me very clearly. Partly, this was the excellent sound system. But it was also because the way they listened. More than one person told me they were more touched by my willingness to show up than by anything I might have said about determination under other circumstances.

In the great myth of the Buddha’s journey, there came a point when he is completely overwhelmed. As he sits meditating under the Bodhi tree, the devil Mara sends temptations to distract him from the wish of his deepest essence. Mara flashes images of the Buddha as a great leader, as a huge success in business with mountains of money, surrounded by beautiful women. He shows the Buddha that can make India great again if he would just give up his quest to awaken, and get up and do something. The Buddha will not move.

When temptation doesn’t work, Mara tries fear, conjuring visions of terrible armies howling for his blood. These armies are external and also internal, legions of anxieties and fears. But the Buddha does not flinch. Slowly, he reached down and touched the earth. The classical explanation is that he is asking the Earth itself to bear witness to his many life times of effort. Not his blinding brilliance or his unique talent, mind you, but h.is effort, his perseverance, his willingness to show up no matter what. His willingness to fail and fail again. “Ever tried. Ever failed,” writes Beckett. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The Buddha understood what the Christian author G.K. Chesterton meant when he wrote, “Everything worth doing is worth doing badly. “

Touching the Earth symbolizes humility, coming down out of our thoughts, out of the busy hive of ego, to join the rest of life. The Latin word humus, the rich living earth, is related to the word humility. When difficulty arises, it creates a clearing in the deadening trance of habit. We remember that what really matters the things that we spend so much time thinking about every day. What matters is much more essential. Being alive, for example. Taking part in life, having a chance to give and receive in the most elemental ways, taking in the beauty of the world and giving back where we can.

At moments when the ground gives way beneath our feet, it’s good to remember the power of touching the earth, descending from our racing thoughts and fears to an awareness of the present moment. When words fail, we can sometimes discover a new voice and a new kind of determination. We can rise up rooted, like trees.

Tracy Cochran is editorial director of Parabola.

Be The Change: As you face challenges today, persevere, not in a rigid, fixed, determined-outcome sort of way,  but gently, "flowing like water, willing to meet the conditions at hand yet never giving up."

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

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A Special Kind of Grace: The Remarkable Story of the Devadosses

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. --C.S. Lewis

A Special Kind of Grace: The Remarkable Story of the Devadosses

--by DailyGood.org, Sep 10, 2016

She starts to speak, softly and in beautiful Tamil. Now and again he joins in, with a sly sentence here, a funny line there. They are sharing the story of their lives with a roomful of strangers. Before they started no one in the audience knew who they were. By the close of the evening- no one would be able to forget.

Manohar is a scientist-writer-artist, an innovator with a restless intelligence and vivid imagination. He grew up in the Madurai of the 1940s, a schoolboy at large, roaming the city under the great gopurams (temple towers) of Goddess Meenakshi.

Mahema, his wife, is an engaging person, lively and articulate. She was born and raised in Madras, a convent-educated gold-medallist who studied Art and Literature.

Soon after they were married the couple moved to America. They had a beautiful baby girl named Suja. They traveled. They made friends. Eventually they moved back to India. Wherever they were, they lived and laughed a lot.

And very often they talked about the Art of Giving, something dear to Mahema's heart. It was important to her- to them- that they share their many blessings with others. She was a wonderful teacher, he was a gifted scientist, and they were both talented artists. Together they found many ways to give.

And Life was Good.

Then there was the car accident that changed everything. Mahema was badly hurt. The accident left her paralyzed below the shoulders- for life.

'She had no control over many bodily functions ... she would have to be loaded with drugs that would dull her sharp mind. She would have to live with the constant threat of infections, bedsores and spasms. She would be a 'dependent' all her life, needing 24-hour attention ...' 
- Manohar Devadoss, from his book "Dreams, Seasons & Promises"

Mahema looked at her new life and it was hard. From now on it was going to be easier for her to receive than give. Easier- yes. But who says Mahema chose the easy way?

Because she didn't.

When dreams are destroyed it takes a rare kind of courage to pick up the pieces, to push past the pain, self-pity, the but-why-me-Lord?

bewilderment. " All I wanted," says Mahema, " was the strength to be a good mother, a good wife and a good friend�.those were my dreams." So she reached inside herself to find that strength. And she did.

More than thirty years later- here she is. Blooming, beaming in her wheelchair. She's sixty-three and she's beautiful. She is here to tell this audience that they must focus on the good things in their lives, and on all that they CAN do. " Believe in your Dreams," she says, not once but many times.

Mahema started teaching Spoken English classes at her home, she began work on a series of childrens books, she joined several women's groups and began to head fund-raising activities for a number of charities, she went through physiotherapy and slowly, painstakingly learned to use her shoulder muscles to write. People were inevitably drawn to her, by her charm, warmth and especially her cheerfulness. The pain was still there, and the grief of loss- but Mahema refused to dwell in it. She put it aside and opened the doors of her changed life to the world. " I know I still can be of service to people," says Mahema, smiling.

Listening to her speak you realize that service is an attitude- a mindset. It means putting the best of yourself forward no matter where you are or what you're doing. It's irrelevant that Mahema is in a wheelchair, and that she cannot hold the microphone or even sip from a glass of water by herself. Her generosity of spirit transcends her disability. Some people wonder what they have to give the world. Mahema reminds us that without exception we all have something to give -- arguably one of the best gifts of all -- ourselves.

Through all of this she had one constant, unfailing companion, one person whose strength would stand in when hers faltered. Manohar Devadoss felt the loss as keenly as his wife, and would fight as hard to overcome it. From the minutest detail of her crucial and complicated medical routine to the exact angle at which the wheelchair must be placed when she is being lifted out of their car, he knows it all. For more than three decades he has been her most faithful nurse and attendant always looking for ways to lessen the burden of pain she carries. He is particularly proud of a self-devised technique he uses to carry Mahema up long flights of stairs in her wheelchair. An incredible feat- especially when you realize that Manohar cannot see the steps, or even the wheelchair.

Around the time of the accident Manohar's vision began to fail. He was diagnosed with Retinitis pigmentosa- a degenerative eye condition for which there is no known cure.

Today he is almost totally blind.

The silence in the hall is very loud. Mere curiosity was replaced a long time ago with a growing sense of wonder, because the twin-tragedies in this story have inspired more than ready sympathy. This couple is here to share- not their sadness, but their strength.

Five years ago Manohar published his first book, "The Green Well Years", an affectionate tribute to his early years in Madurai. It retells the magic of a South Indian boyhood set against the beguiling charm of an old temple-city. The exquisite pen-and-ink drawings in the book are his. Because of his condition, Manohar has no color perception, he has acute tunnel vision, and the little he does see

is as if seen through a pinhole. Yet his drawings are flawless, sharp-edged, heartbreaking reproductions of snapshots from his life.

How does he do it? With special eyedrops to dilate his pupils, with super strong lights and special magnifiers, with gloves (because the lights make his hands sweat and that could blotch the drawing), with a photographic memory and uncompromising attention to detail, with a dedication and perseverance that go far beyond the ordinary.

Together each year they work on a special set of greeting cards. Manohar does the drawing and Mahema prepares a short write-up explaining the particular significance of the place, building, statue or scene that he has drawn. The cards are sold and the proceeds donated to one of the many charities they are involved with. The Art of Giving is as much a part of their lives today as it ever was.

The impossible is worth reaching for. You learn that, listening to these two. When you start testing the boundaries of what you can do- you break through self-imposed limitations. " Believe in Yourself," says Mahema. " Believe in your dreams and in yourself."

They live life in loving detail. Sunsets, a special dish, an old tune, an unexpected guest, a sudden breeze -- when these things come by, they are There. When you embrace life you come alive to the beauty of the present. That's what these two have done.

Today Manohar Devadoss has three books to his credit, and is working on a fourth. Mahema continues to be involved with a number of fund-raising projects and women's committees. Both of them have a wide circle of friends and admirers and continue to be an inspiration to everyone who knows them.

Accept Life.

Sounds simple, lives pretty tough. Our rebel hearts stage a hundred mutinies each day. Resisting, refusing, denying, defying. Sometimes we fight life off with flying fists. Forgetting to remember that it takes more courage to be still. Because Acceptance isn't about weak-willed submission to the blows of chance and fate, it isn't about glum indifference or spiritless passivity (even if the confusion is convenient). Acceptance is strength with wings. It's the power of compassion married to the humility of understanding. It lifts you above regret and rage to a place where hate is not an option, to a place where the difficult beauty of each moment is lived, learnt from- and loved.

Acceptance is a special kind of grace.

Manohar and Mahema Devadoss are a couple who live that grace day by day.

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Editor's note: Mahema Devadoss passed away in 2008, but her legacy of compassion and grace lives on in the hearts of the many people she touched. Though his vision continues to deteriorate, Manohar Devadoss still draws and continues to inspire many with his art, his writing, and his warm zest for life. He turns 80-years-old today. You can send him a birthday note of appreciation here. 

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Manohar Devadoss is a self-taught artist and the author of several books, including "The Green Well Years" and "A Poem To Courage". 

Be The Change: Mahema Devadoss passed away in 2008, but her legacy of love lives on. Manohar Devadoss turns 80-years-old today and continues to hold the torch of their inspiration. Send him a birthday message of appreciation for the shining example of grace he and his wife offered the world.

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Right Away Is The Opposite Of Now

Right Away is the Opposite of Now - Jacob Needleman

Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar. I asked him about one of the most striking ways that the Tibetans express the uniqueness of the human condition. Imagine, they say, that deep in the vast ocean there swims a great and ancient turtle who surfaces for air once every hundred years. Imagine further that floating somewhere in the ocean is a single ox-yoke carried here and there by random waves and currents. What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will happen to emerge precisely through the center of the ox-yoke? That is how rare it is to be born as a human being!

In the middle of our conversation, I pointed to the crowds of men and women rushing by on the street and I gestured in a way to indicate not only them, but all the thousands and millions of people rushing around in the world. "Tell me, Lobsang," I said, "if it is so rare to be born a human being, how come there are so many people in the world?"

My friend slowed his pace and then stopped. He waited for a moment, taking in my question. I remember suddenly being able to hear, as though for the first time, the loud and frenetic traffic all around us. He looked at me and very quietly replied, "How many human beings do you see?"

In a flash, I understood the meaning of the story and the idea. Most of the people I was seeing, in the inner state they were in at that moment, were not really people at all. Most were what the Tibetans call "hungry ghosts." They did not really exist. They were not really *there*. They were *busy*, they were *in a hurry*. They -- like all of us -- were obsessed with doing things *right away*. But *right away* is the opposite of *now* -- the opposite of the lived present moment in which the passing of time no longer tyrannizes us. The hungry ghosts are starved for "more" time; but the more time we hungry ghosts get, the more time we "save", the hungrier we become, the less we actually *live*. And I understood that it is not exactly more time, more days and years, that we are starved for, it is the present moment.

Through our increasing absorption in the busyness, we have the present moment. "Right away" is not now. What a toxic illusion!

About the Author: excerpted from Jacob Needleman's book "Time and the Soul" 

Reclaiming Friendship

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. – Aristotle

Reclaiming Friendship: A Visual Taxonomy of Platonic Relationships to Counter the Commodification of the Word “Friend”

--by Maria Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Sep 01, 2016

Friendship, C.S. Lewis believed, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself … has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” But the poetic beauty of this sentiment crumbles into untruth for anyone who has ever been buoyed from the pit of despair by the unrelenting kindness of a friend, or whose joys have been amplified by a friend’s warm willingness to bear witness.

I often puzzle over the nature, structure, and function of friendship in human life — a function I have found to be indispensable to my own spiritual survival and, I suspect, to that of most human beings. But during a recent interview on Think Again, I found myself concerned with the commodification of the word “friend” in our culture. We call “friends” peers we barely know beyond the shallow roots of the professional connection, we mistake mere mutual admiration for friendship, we name-drop as “friends” acquaintances associating with whom we feel reflects favorably on us in the eyes of others, thus rendering true friendship vacant of Emerson’s exacting definition. We have perpetrated a corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation, compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.

In countering this conflation, I was reminded of philosopher Amelie Rorty’s fantastic 1976 taxonomy of the levels of personhood and wondered what a similar taxonomy of interpersonhood might look like. I envisioned a conception of friendship as concentric circles of human connection, intimacy, and emotional truthfulness, each larger circle a necessary but insufficient condition for the smaller circle it embraces.“I live my life in widening circles,” Rilke wrote.

Within the ether of strangers — all the humans who inhabit the world at the same time as we do, but whom we have not yet met — there exists a large outermost circle of acquaintances. Inside it resides the class of people most frequently conflated with “friend” in our culture, to whom I’ve been referring by the rather inelegant but necessarily descriptive term person I know and like. These are people of whom we have limited impressions, based on shared interests, experiences, or circumstances, on the basis of which we have inferred the rough outlines of a personhood we regard positively.

Even closer to the core is the kindred spirit — a person whose values are closely akin to our own, one who is animated by similar core principles and stands for a sufficient number of the same things we ourselves stand for in the world. These are the magnifiers of spirit to whom we are bound by mutual goodwill, sympathy, and respect, but we infer this resonance from one another’s polished public selves — our ideal selves — rather than from intimate knowledge of one another’s interior lives, personal struggles, inner contradictions, and most vulnerable crevices of character.

Some kindred spirits become friends in the fullest sense — people with whom we are willing to share, not without embarrassment but without fear of judgment, our gravest imperfections and the most anguishing instances of falling short of our own ideals and values. The concentrating and consecrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy. A friend is a person before whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldn’t diminish the friend’s admiration and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the real.

It is important to clarify here that the ideal self is not a counterpoint to the real self in the sense of being inauthentic. Unlike the seeming self, which springs from our impulse for self-display and which serves as a kind of deliberate mask, the ideal self arises from our authentic values and ideals. Although it represents an aspirational personhood, who we wish to be is invariably part of who we are — even if we aren’t always able to enact those ideals. In this sense, the gap between the ideal self and the real self is not one of insincerity but of human fallibility. The friend is one who embraces both and has generous patience for the rift between the two. A true friend holds us lovingly accountable to our own ideals, but is also able to forgive, over and over, the ways in which we fall short of them and can assure us that we are more than our stumbles, that we are shaped by them but not defined by them, that we will survive them with our personhood and the friendship intact.

For a complementary perspective, see poet and philosopher David Whyte on the true meaning of friendship and John O’Donohue on the ancient Celtic notion of “soul-friend.”

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Maria Popova is a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer,andis the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings (which offers a free weekly newsletter).  

Be The Change: Call an old friend today. Someone you haven't spoken to in awhile, and who holds a special place in your heart.

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