in twenty years, what do you want to remember?

the point is to live everything.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

The point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live the way into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

when bad things happen to good people.

While I was on the retreat, one of the books that I read was When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner. 

To me, When Bad Things Happen to Good People is simply saying that God cannot control what happens to us, but if we let Him, He can control how we deal with it.  Everything doesn't happen or a reason, but we can find meaning personally in everything so we can create opportunites to grow through it. By giving suffering meaning and reason, we are able to serve God and teach others to be better people. 

- entry from my journal




Impactful quotes from the book:

Ask yourself "if this happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?"

We pray to you, O God, for strength, determination, and willpower, to do instead of just to pray, to become instead of merely to wish.

God does not send us the problem; He gives us the strength to cope with it.

Love is not the admiration of perfection, but the acceptance of an imperfect person with all his imperfections, because loving and accepting makes us better and stronger.

how to wake up every morning on top of the world.

When you wake up in the morning you are always asking yourself questions whether you realize it or not. As you brush your teeth, drink your coffee or eat your breakfast thoughts are running through your head. You might be thinking “why am I so I tired, why didn’t I sleep earlier, what am I going to eat, etc, etc.”


These things generally don’t serve any useful purpose and in some cases as you can see are even hurting you. The idea behind using questions is to take conscious control of the direction of your day. So, let me give you a few examples of things that you could ask yourself first thing in the morning:


◦What do I have to look forward to today?
◦What’s absolutely perfect about my life?
◦How can I make today absolutely awesome?
◦What’s the best thing that could happen today?
By asking yourself these kinds of questions you start to shift the focus of your mind towards all of the things you want to have happen. One interesting thing to note is that your questions don’t need to have any basis in reality because your brain will answer anything you ask it quite literally. So if you’re going to be delusional, you might as well make your delusions extremely empowering.


The key to using this effectively however is to do it for 30 days in a row. What happens when you do this is that your brain will create a link, known as a neuro-association, between the empowering states you create with your questions and being awake in the morning.


One Question to Ask Yourself Every Morning


For about two weeks now, I’ve been asking myself one question from the moment I wake up. “What am I grateful for?.” You’ve heard before that you should start every single day with an attitude of gratitude. This is probably the simplest way to actually do that.


If you ask yourself that question enough days in a row you will wake up feeling on top of the world every single day. As you start to view your life and the world around you as full of things to be grateful for, you’re going to bring more and more of that into your life.


We all have lots to be grateful for, but we often get caught up in all the things that are wrong with our lives. Hopefully this will enable you shift your focus.

tiny buddha.