43 posts tagged “life”

Still Waiting For The Light To Change

We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.
- Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)

Sometimes all we can do is to roll with the punches, deal with the circumstances life throws at us, and look for the chance to enact change.

Many would call that powerlessness. After all, when your choices in life are outside your control, you can't be said to have control of your life.

Do others have control over your life? Many times it seems that way, that if only someone else would do what you want or what they promised to do, life would be better. It's hard to wait for someone else, especially when you know that the other person is giving your promised work low priority but its very important to you because you can't progress with several other things in the meantime.

I confess, I allow disappointment to creep into my life sometimes. It's always a disappointment with people. The vagaries of weather (no one's is stable now, likely never was), the ups and downs of politics (the few honest ones get shot down more often than the crooks), illness, even being the next person in line after the last item on a great sale was sold don't bother me.

That's life. If I expect to find great pleasure in the good things about life, I must be prepared to accept the things that really suck. Without one, I couldn't appreciate the other. The good looks good only by comparing it to the bad. "No pain, no gain" may not be true for athletics and exercise, but it's true for emotions. The more and worse you experience that bad, the greater your opportunity to appreciate the good when it comes.

People who promise something but don't deliver really get to me. The guy who delighted me when he said he could fix my tractor--he unstuck a valve and replaced a spring--has kept the parts at his place for weeks because he is too busy with his own projects to put my tractor back together. The computer expert friend who may have been able to help me avoid having a rootkit destroy my hard drive if he had given me the necessary advice in a timely fashion has kept my computer out of commission for weeks because he's too busy to help, even though he has promised to do so several times.

I bought a snow blower for my tractor. I asked if the man could deliver it because I had no way to get it home. He said "No problem" and I paid him. He phoned that evening to ask how I planned to get the 750 pound blower off the back of his pickup truck. I reminded him that I had told him ahead of time that I had no way to get the blower down from a truck. He forgot. Now he has my money and my snow blower, because he forgot he couldn't deliver what he said he could.

These people were not intending to lie when they made their promises to me. They simply didn't organize their thoughts and plans to the extent necessary to avoid conflicts. They didn't plan ahead. They got too busy to get all the work done they promised to others, but didn't extend the courtesy of telling the others when they might be able to get to their needs.

Sometimes just coping with the problems life throws your way--whatever their nature--is all you can do. It's called survival. When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. It's always painful at first. Eventually, if you keep looking, you will find a way to circumvent what may be severe consequences of a problem.

Some say God doesn't give us more than we can handle, though they wish God didn't trust them so much. Some call it courage or perseverance or strength of character that people can get through their lives with burdens far greater than the average. It's not really any of that.

Life is tough. Those who have it easy and don't appreciate what they have waste their lives because they don't accomplish much of real value. Those who slog their way through what seem to be incredible trials and tribulations, always looking to a brighter future find ways to enjoy life more because they appreciate the contrast between the bad and the good.

Moreover, the survivors act as role models for the rest of us. If it weren't for them, our species would never have survived the long process of natural selection.

We literally exist because those before us--at least many of them--survived rigors of life far worse than we can imagine. We don't owe them anything. We do owe it to ourselves and to those who will follow us to survive and to improve.

Those who don't struggle with life don't improve because they don't know how. They have never had to work their way out of problems and difficulties that might have destroyed them. The survivors know how. They learn as they struggle.

As individuals and as a species, we inherited much because of those who struggled and survived before us. It's our job to struggle and survive so that future generations will know it can be done.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children the skills of coping, of surviving and of thriving in a struggling world.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein

Do you wonder sometimes if Einstein didn't get sucked into a black hole somewhere and spewed out covered in some of the strange stuff he talks about other than physics?

Who can't see with their own eyes and feel with their own heart?

As it turns out, most of us.

Most of what we value in life--including what we do with the precious hours allotted to us in our own lives--we adopt from what we have hard from others. We eat more or less the same things as our neighbours and family eat. We subscribe to spiritual beliefs somewhat similar to those of others we know. We wear similar clothing to work, on the golf course, playing a sport or shopping.

Would you not think a down-and-outer bum from the street would be clearly out of place in the same pew as you at church? Yet for all you know, the "bum" may lead a more spiritually pure life than you, may help others more often than you, may even have a personal net worth far in excess of yours.

So why would the bum not belong beside you in church? Likely because you think he may embarrass you by embarrassing himself, meaning that you care what others think about you when you sit in the same church pew as a bum in ragged, dirty and smelly clothing.

Surely when we fall in love we feel with our own heart more clearly than we do with emotions at other times in our lives. That's a one-to-one thing that only involves two people (only one if the love is unrequited, but let's consider two the norm). Two people who love each other deeply care only about themselves. It's not selfish so much as self centred, or a universe of only two people.

Yet how do we find and choose such a person? Most often we use standards or guidelines passed on to us from others. Most times we won't get involved with someone our friends or family can't stand. Because their opinion matters. We use other standards to measure potential mates, but we usually acquire them from others.

The "deeply in love" stage is limited in most long term relationships. It's known as the romantic phase. It usually lasts from six weeks to eight months, depending on the people involved and circumstances. By the time a year has passed in any relationship, the romantic phase is over and a couple has moved on to a deeply bonded relationship. Romantic gestures may continue, but the hormonal rush of romance will have tapered off to something more manageable. If the relationship continues, both members will be sizing up where they want it to go and where the other may be prepared to have it go.

The act of sizing up where we want a relationship to go is largely determined by what others tell us. Nothing in nature tells us it's time to evaluate. Lots of effects in our lives do just that. I'm reminded of how often that happened in the popular television series Friends, where relationships ended because one couldn't meet the evaluation tests of the other.

When do we act on our own, using our own eyes to provide independent evidence to our brain so that it can make up its mind (pun noted) without influence from outside? When do we act only according to the dictates of our heart, without letting anyone else express their opinions, however well intentioned? In fact, not that often.

We are not just social animals who require the attention and approval of others in our social circle, we are also individuals who need others in our lives to provide validation, approval, love and other aspects of social intercourse. We are not rock or islands in the stream. Nor can we be for long. We each function within a particular social milieu. Stepping outside of it by making totally independent choices may jeopardize our membership in the group.

Einstein was right. We rarely make independent decisions, with our eyes or out hearts. Usually it's because we can't afford to be so independent.

So are well all slaves to each other? Or to someone who is effectively our master? No. Slavery today, in the free world, is a matter of choice.

What we must do sometimes is balance off what others want us to do and think with what we believe is best for us. When we decide to act independent of the wishes and advice of others who care about us, we need good communication skills to express our feelings in ways that will not offend or alienate them.

Sure it's hard. So was relativity for Einstein. But what else have you got to do with your life than to get better at it?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want children to be able to make wise decisions as they grow up, to be able to balance the intricacies of life so that they can be happy and get along well with those they want to hold dear.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Much misconstruction and bitterness are spared to him who thinks
naturally upon what he owes to others, rather than on what he ought
to expect from them.
- Elizabeth de Meulan Guizot, French author (1773-1827)

What do I owe to others? What do you owe to others? What do I owe to you?

Should anyone even care?

Yes.

To begin, those who are fully aware of what they should expect from others will always be disappointed. If nine people out of ten they meet do exactly as they expect, these people--the expectors--will remember the tenth. The tenth, the violator of norms the expectors expect of others, will stand out in their memories like the proverbial sore thumb.

That's human nature. The behaviour that violates norms is not just remembered, but is often held up as indicative of the kind of person who does "that kind of thing." We tend to forgive ourselves our misdeeds before we are prepared to forgive others. A generalization, to be sure, but still typical of human nature.

Tell a lie and it may take you decades of truth telling to overcome the memory others have of that lie. Violate the fidelity of marriage and it will result in divorce in most cases. Fail to live up to a promise you made may cost you a friendship, or a customer, or the trust of who knows how many people who learn about it. Yet it's in the nature of humans to tell the occasional lie, in their hormonal and instinctive makeup to seek more than one sexual partner, and it's often nothing more than memory failure or being too busy that causes people to fail to fulfill their promises.

Putting too much emphasis on what we expect of others is fundamentally fraught with failure.

Think now about someone you know who offers a lot of himself or herself to help others. That person is usually (but not universally) loved and respected. There will always be those who resent what such givers accomplish and the respect and accolades they may receive because they are jealous. But jealousy and envy are sicknesses that fortunately live in few people.

Do I owe something to you? Well, you may say, I owe you a good read since you took the time to read this. From my point of view, I spent over five decades of my life actively learning from others, while having little to offer them in return. By writing this article and many others, I share what I have learned as a way of paying forward what others gave to me over so many years.

I am happier now than I have ever been in my life. To a great extent, that happiness is based on what I learned from others. In some cases, what I learned from them was how to cope with misfortune and errors. In others it was how to do things I had never tackled before and to see them through to completion and success. If I share that with you, you have a better chance of achieving what I have, of feeling the way I feel.

I can't make you happy. I can only point you in the right direction. Your motivation must come from within you. If you focus on how others disappoint you, you will often be disappointed, have negative feelings about others and the world in general. If you focus on what you might do to make their lives a little better, you will have successes. Some greater than others, that's true. Some successes you may never learn about because the others involved moved on before changing their lives.

But you will know.

More than gratitude and self satisfaction result from helping others. It takes time and many instances of helping. But something happens within you that changes your life forever. I don't want to be specific about what this mystery is because I don't want you to use it as an incentive to help others. Do that because it's the right thing to do.

Doing that kind of right thing feels good. Try it if you haven't. Do more if you have. If the latter, you will understand the mystery already.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy and well balanced children who will take better care of their world, their families and their lives than their ancestors did.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves and
the fewer and fewer people one likes.
- Gale D. Webbe, clergyman and author (1909-2000)

It almost seems as if there is something missing from this quote, something additional that the person who captured the quote originally neglected to include.

But first let's consider the concept of spirituality. In this sense of the word, we generally agree that spirituality refers to the incorporeal, that which is not a material part of nature. Whether the supernatural part of spirituality could be pure energy or something entirely separate from our understanding of reality is debatable.

Mostly it's debatable because science tends to think of energy as something that may be harnessed to do work. Dark energy, a recently invented term to describe why the universe is apparently blowing apart faster than ever before, is accepted as energy because it's a force that is actually doing something. As God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to actually do anything (especially any kind of work), science disavows the supernatural as being pure energy.

Just because God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to do work does not mean that it doesn't exist, only that science cannot deal with it because it's beyond the realm and purview of science. Science works almost entirely within the proverbial "box" thinking. Anything that does not fall within the "walls" of the box does not exist and will not be considered seriously by science.

Spirituality, by its definition, includes something that is beyond matter and beyond the thinking box of science.

What does it mean, if a person has grown spiritually? It means something that people who insist upon living their lives within the box cannot understand. They can't even grasp the possibility or potential because--whether they realize it or not--they deny the possibility of existence beyond their box.

Imagine someone who has grown up living in one house. The person has never left that house, ever, in 35 years. All that person knows of the world is what he experiences in that house and what he sees out the windows. He comes to believe that what is inside the house is real, what he can see outside of the house may or may not be real (the way we think of movies), and what he may hear about what he cannot experience or see simply does not exist. It could not exist, he believes, because he has no way to comprehend existence beyond his experience and his senses.

Growing spiritually means experiencing beyond what box thinkers can conceive could be real. A person who has grown spiritually passes among people who have no grasp and who have had no inclination to understand or experience anything beyond the box walls of their lives. The spiritual person may love others in their life, recognizing them as part of the wholeness that is total existence. But he may find them hard to like because they are so simple, so limited, so ignorant.

A person who has grown so he or she has the ability to live in a spiritual existence will not dislike anyone. Yet they have no need to like others either. Does a grain of sand feel the need to like and be liked by other grains around it on a beach? The grain of sand, like the spiritual person, lives in a wholeness of everything, where sand, plants, animals, people and even the person himself is a component of the whole of existence.

We know that when plants and animals and people die, their bodies get recycled so the atoms that formed them become part of something else. We know that matter (stuff) can be changed into energy (such as by burning) and energy into matter (as proven by Einstein's famous equation). It's called the Law of Conservation. Nothing disappears, though it may change its form. What exists, continues to exist, whether as matter or as energy.

Box thinkers, non-spiritual people, believe the basic physics of this concept, but refuse to acknowledge its implications, its consequences for our lives and for all of existence through all of history. Is there nothing beyond matter and energy? If so, then there is nothing to you other than body cells and energy. That means nothing that is "you," no personality, no non-physical life, nothing that can form relationships with others. Could a cell of your body or potential energy within your gut form a relationship with other cells or other forms of energy within you or elsewhere? Most of us would say no, meaning that there is more to us than cells and energy.

Spiritual people live in two dimensions (or universes, if you will), one tangible and sentient, the other totally beyond the senses and understanding of box thinkers. Moreover, the latter is beyond the comprehension of themselves. Yet that lack of understanding, that intangibility, that failure to grasp is not frightening. It brings peace.

Spiritual people cannot help but love others, all others. They are not afraid of what they don't understand. After all, what they don't like or understand about the tangible world is only temporary, an existence in transition. What matters to them is real and does not change markedly. It's beyond understanding, outside the box.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to help their children understand the realities of the world and realities beyond their understanding, but still within their ability to experience.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

A life that is meaningful, every single day, is rare in this world.
Your life was a gift to you. Make it a gift to the world.
- Elizabeth May, American-born Canadian activist, writer, politician (b.1954 )

What is a meaningful life? What does it mean for a life to be meaningful?

In the final days of your life, as you look back over your many years, will you ask yourself if your life has been meaningful? Likely.

What will be your answer? That depends on what you define as meaningful.

For some people living through the most productive years of their lives, living a meaningful life means having the respect of others. That could mean accumulating as much personal fortune as possible or as many valuable objects as you can. That's called materialism and it's prevalent in most large cities today.

This kind of materialism is so common because our industries and education systems teach it. Money rules. He who dies with the most toys wins.The values of needs of industry rule what gets taught in classrooms.

It seems like sheer greed. But it's more like the leaders of industry indoctrinating their employees in the need to earn progressively greater income, to wear increasingly expensive, fashionable and well tailored clothing, to buy an upscale vehicle each time, to own a house that is bigger than needed, to have a mortgage that would have crushed their parents, to belong to the most exclusive clubs they can.

In turn, the employees teach these values to their own children. The process and value system spread exponentially. Soon everyone in the neighbourhood, the city, all cities in the country believe it. Because "that's what everyone believes. They all say that." Comments about the "rat race" go unheeded as whining by losers.

I would like to relate two personal instances to you, from my life. The first has to do with my first wife. We were many years divorced when she was diagnosed with cancer that had metastasized through her body. She spent 15 months at home, alone, thinking about her life.

We separated and divorced because she adopted the feminist propaganda of the day that held that families and husbands prevented women from "reaching their full potential." Once she left me with our children to raise, she rose from resource teacher to vice principal then to principal within a few years. She was highly respected and recognized in her field, frequently asked to lead special events for teachers, such as college courses.

She made the money. She had the clothes and the car and the house. She never missed a child support payment.

Fifteen months turned out to be a very long time to ruminate over how meaningful her life had been. Especially living alone, with dwindling visits from her own children and her one friend. She had no visits from colleagues who once shared her values. She was no longer of value to them.

She died in hospital, surrounded by medical personnel. But still alone. About six weeks earlier, in a phone conversation, she said "I made some mistakes in my marriage." She still didn't get it, that it was "our" marriage. There was no doubt she spent most of her waking hours reviewing her life.

To late to change it then.

Fast forward several years to 2006 when my present wife and I decided to change our place of residence. Knowing we wanted to leave the Canadian province where we lived but not knowing where, we decided to spend the next two years researching and visiting the most likely possibilities.

Using the internet and telephone, we narrowed our first choice quickly to Miramichi, New Brunswick. About all we knew about Miramichi was that it had lots of water (rivers) flowing through it and nearby in the northern New Brunswick hinterlands. And that its people shared the well known friendliness of Canadian Maritimers.

On our first vacation visit to Miramichi, we were pleased by the settings and value of properties we saw, but shocked by the people. Miramichiers were unlike any people we had ever met in Ontario. They seemed to actually care about strangers. When they asked how you were, they waited to hear an answer because it mattered to them.

We decided to take our second vacation visit in 2006 to Miramichi as well. The shock of meeting people remained the same.

We discovered that people were more important to them than money. Though Miramichi is a relatively poor part of Canada in terms of accumulated wealth, the people respect themselves and each other. Even, as we learned, strangers. No one can look bewildered or lost or to have a problem in The Miramichi (as the region is known) without someone stopping to ask if they can help.

Sometimes, as New Brunswick is officially bilingual English/French, the helper could speak little or no English, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that someone apparently needed assistance. One stranger outside a library advised us to look at a house for sale he thought we might like nearby--he liked it but wouldn't put an offer on it if we wanted to buy it.

Another overheard my wife ask a clerk in a big store for postcards, which the store didn't carry and few stores did. The woman searched a store she thought she remembered had postcards, found the store, then waited in the middle of the mall for us to emerge so she could tell us where to find the cards we sought. These were just two small examples of the many offers of help we received.

In 2008 we bought a property outside of Miramichi. Since moving we have learned that Miramichiers and the Miramichi itself make our new home the best place on earth we could have found to live.

There you have two examples, one of a person who believed that money was the most important thing in life and another of people who believe that people are always more important, the most important thing in life.

The people of the Miramichi make every day meaningful. They live happy. They die fulfilled.

If you decide to move to the Miramichi, please leave your values, your prejudices and your materialist preferences behind. If you don't, you will be lonely here.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who can lead fulfilling lives without sacrificing themselves to the masters of industry.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

That is called integrity. Unfortunately it is not something you can buy or steal.
- The L Word

The easiest way to understand the basic concept of integrity is: doing the right thing when no one is looking and no reward forthcoming.

The delicious irony of the second sentence of the quote is that buying someone's good will or stealing anything would be the opposite of having integrity.

Does integrity exist today or is it a virtue more comfortably left in the past?

No one can claim to be pure and noble. We all have our weaknesses and strengths. None of us is perfect. When we demonstrate moral weakness, we join the vast majority of humanity that is not consistent about integrity.

Most of us try to do our best most of the time. Whether anyone is watching is or not, whether we may get a reward or not. If we don't, we may have trouble sleeping at night, we may suffer stress and its resulting anxiety beyond what we should, our relationships with those we love will surely suffer eventually.

Our media fill our minds with examples of every kind of immoral behaviour that is anything but integrity. Yet, somehow, most of us keep trying to do what is right.

Whether we have integrity or we act the opposite way, a large part of the responsibility lies with our parents. In the first five years of life, parents teach us by example or by actively teaching us lessons to live with integrity or to work against the benefit of society as a whole to gain for ourselves. As adults, we each make decisions for ourselves. Yet most of us, especially after age 40 (usually sooner), follow the life lessons and role models given to us by our parents.

Integrity is how we survive instead of descending into chaos as families and communities and nations.

Why should we care about our community as a whole if our community seems to not care about us? Actually, it does. Communities don't have good enough social skills to express to us how much they appreciate us. What they do have is a penchant for whining and crying when its citizens misbehave. They whine and cry because they have not yet gained sufficient maturity to know what to do to solve its problems and avoid them in the future.

As sophisticated as we have become technologically and to a lesser extent scientifically, socially as communities we are just entering our adolescence. Seven billion of us live in an immature world that only our descendents will see into adulthood.

Just as we can't force an adolescent of 14 years to act like an adult in all ways, we can't push our communities to act more mature when they don't know how.

We can only do the right thing, do our small part to see that the community we belong to grows in a healthy way.

That means living with integrity.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who live comfortably with integrity and maturity.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Men are born to succeed, not fail.
- Henry David Thoreau, American author, poet and philosopher (1817-1862)

Well, heck, that sounds simple enough.

So why doesn't it work?

Because to succeed, a person must have the tools to succeed and the attitude that the goal is possible. In other words, a person needs a good work ethic, something to do and the means to do it.

Easy again.

But most people settle for less than what they are capable of, then either overwork to benefit their employer or underwork in the mistaken belief that only partial success at work does not equal only partial success in life.

If the original statement is correct, then why are most people not feeling successful, fulfilled and personally complete?

We don't teach to success of the individual. We teach success for the nation. We teach that success for corporations is good. We teach that our working to keep corporations successful is good. We teach that spending every bit of income we get is good, that it should make us happy and keep the economy rolling.

But we don't teach to individual success. That is, we don't teach to success of the individual on a massive, nationwide scale.

What we do teach individuals is that they should have the skills to satisfy employers sufficiently that they will keep us employed. We almost never teach entrepreneurial skills because that would be counter to the benefit of corporations.

Ask most teens why they will continue with their education past high school and you will hear "so I can get a good job" more than any other answer. In other words, "so that I can get a good paying job." Hopefully, one that will not disappear when the employer downsizes because it has not forecast future markets correctly and has lost money, so needs to cut staff to show more profit or minimize losses to satisfy its shareholders.

We don't even teach our children what it means to be successful, other than that they will be happy being constant consumers. Which few are, really. Again, ask a teen what it means for an adult to be successful and the answer will most likely be related to a secure job with good income (with which to buy lots of stuff).

It's not my purpose to teach you what success is. I know what it is for me. But it took me a few decades of searching to learn.

You need to learn what success is for you. What it really is. What it really means to lead a fulfilling life.

Then teach it to every kid you know.

Schools don't do this. Their purpose is to train employees to be good workers and consumers.

Corporations control the curriculum. If you doubt this, check the name brands on all kinds of products in today's high schools and even in grade schools. Including in text books.

First you must learn what success in life really is. Then teach it to others, both adults and children.

How many people, on their deathbeds, have claimed that they should have worked harder or that they should have spent more of their money in order to make their own lives and the lives of their family members better? Corporations want us to believe that we should follow that line of unthinking.

Learn, then teach. It's what we are supposed to do. Corporations took that responsibility from us because we walked away from it ourselves.

When you teach children what is meaningful in life, don't report it to your employer. The employer won't like that. Just do it in private.

A recent study (actually several of them) showed that large corporations were set up to be sociopathological (amoral, capable of violence or spreading fear without feeling guilty). It's part of their corporate ethic.

This is the power that will control the destiny of your children unless you change what your kids believe.

If you don't like it, do something about it. Talk it up. Social change happens only when enough people believe that children should be taught differently. Every socially acceptable norm of today was once a radical idea. Then people talked about it.

So talk. It's easy.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to have a time scale, content and methodology for teaching children what they need to know to lead successful lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Some of these quotes have attributions, some are from that famous philosopher and observer of life, Anonymous. A few are my own that came to me as I piloted my way through life today.
................................

Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future.
Faith is having the courage to dance to it today.
- Dr. Peter Kuzmic, theologian, Slovenian-born, citizen of Croatia

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
- Dennis Wholey, American television host and producer (b. 1939)

Laughter is a smile with the volume turned up.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

People laugh because I'm different, I laugh because they're all the same.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

No amount of darkness can hide a spark of light.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

Be like the flower that perfumes the very hand that crushes it.
- Anonymous (Google's best guess)

Last night I watched a movie that was so difficult to understand that I couldn't figure it out until the very end. Then I had to return it to the store. It reminded me of life.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

You don't have to win at life. Life is not about winning. Life is about playing the game and trying to influence others so that they win.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

They say you can't go back to your childhood, that the places you remember will have changed. Even if they haven't, you will have changed so that the you of long ago wouldn't recognize the you of today.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

When your heart breaks, it changes your life. But you had a chance to avoid the hurt. When a child's heart breaks, the child has no defences, no preparation, no means to recover. The reassembled life has no possibility to achieve it's former potential.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

If you hear a great piece of music and your day is not better for it, the problem is not that the music is deficient.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

No matter how much technology you have at your command and friends in your social networking site, there is no substitute for the gentle touch of another live human, for the feel of their breath on your neck, for soft whisper from their lips into your ear.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

Don't think you're ugly. Everyone is beautiful sometimes, always when they smile. Don't think you're beautiful. Everyone is ugly sometimes. The difference is attitude and confidence. Even movie stars are pretty plain looking without makeup. They believe they're beautiful, so that's what they become.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

We're all working on the mysteries of life without any clues. If we knew already, we'd be somewhere else. If we don't learn, we are no better than the simplest animals. If we learn but do nothing with it, we are no better than most larger animals. At least they teach their young thoroughly. Learn and do, or get out of the way and let those who want to be what they can.
- Bill Allin, stalwart pilgrim of life, http://billallin.com

Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who believe that every child should be taught the important lessons of life from the best possible sources.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed "the wise" Roman Emperor, (121 CE - 180 CE)

An emperor of Rome, indeed the leader of any country up to modern times, would need to be sanguine about the future because the chances of his having his head detached from the rest of his body before that body was worn out stood exceedingly high.

What about old Julius? He certainly couldn't have used all of his weapons of reason when he allowed his formerly trusted ally Brutus and his gang to slay him. Actually, he likely did. To the best of his ability.

Julius was a very ill man, suffering from a great deal of pain and loss of his abilities of perception due to disease at the time of his death. It's entirely possible that he did the equivalent of falling on his sword, just to put himself out of misery. He knew he was too sick to rule Rome, to give it his best. Yet his honour forbade him from committing suicide, even if it be for the good of Rome. It's highly likely that he knew what was about to happen when he met privately with his "enemies."

In other words, we now know that Julius Caesar likely used the best of his mental faculties to do what was best for both himself and for Rome. History hasn't recorded the event of his death that way, but history has a way of relating what its teller wants to the story to be.

Marcus Aurelius must also have used his abundant mental faculties during his almost two decades as emperor of Rome (actually king, as Rome did not call anyone an emperor). His reign was the ultimate example of Pax Romana and his death brought turmoil as to who should lead the greatest empire the world had known until then (later the British Empire was greatest in history, covering one-quarter of our planet's surface at one time).

Though Christians were still persecuted in his time in theory, in practice they seldom were. Rome (undoubtedly a brutal regime in many ways, though hardly the worst in history) really was fairly peaceful during Marcus's reign. It would have required considerable weapons of reason to make peace so effectively that the period was given its own name.

So we turn to ourselves. Every media outlet in the western world and most in other parts of the world report almost daily about how bad conditions are in the world. I have heard many young people from North America say that they don't plan to have children because the world is just getting worse and they couldn't in all good conscience bring children into such tragedy.

The world must be getting worse, just listen to our media tell us. But it's not so.

No point in history has ever been so peaceful, with such a great percentage of people living long lives, healthier than their ancestors, in human history. The media always tell us that the world is a terrible place and leave us to conclude that the future will surely be worse. Neither is true.

Even during the dreaded Holocaust, when millions of Jews, cripples, people with much lower than average intelligence and people who simply pissed off the Germans were being exterminated, good things were happening elsewhere in the world. In the west, women who worked necessary jobs in factories earned a decent living and started a movement for equal rights for women that is still going on today. The Jews that survived got a country of their own a few years after the war, something they had not been able to accomplish for themselves for the previous 3000 years. The powers of the world came together as never before to defeat evil.

Just as Marcus Aurelius said that we will face the future as it comes to us with the same weapons of reason that we use today, we must use the weapons of reason we have available to us today. Or we will make the world a worse place to live, unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable for our children and grandchildren.

Our weapons of reason that help us to cope with today must make us realize that good things are happening in the world each day, even we if don't read about them. We must reason that just because our media report almost exclusively bad news does not mean that the world itself is getting worse. They just report what many people want to hear. Paris Hilton makes the news when she sneezes (and maybe her dress has a "wardrobe malfunction"), but we hear nothing about the millions of good people around the world and in our own communities who are doing good deeds and making good things happen every day.

It's important that we heed Marcus Aurelius's advice about the future. It won't be as bad as the fear mongers want us to believe (they make their living scaring people, remember, rather than getting "real" jobs). And the present isn't as bad as almost every source of information we have make it out to be.

We need to use our weapons of reason every day of our life, not just about the future. The more we refuse to find out information about what is really going on in the world and decline to use our powers of reason when we learn it, the worse the world will become and the worse our own lives will become.

Not learning and not thinking is what will make the world really worse. Bad guys can easily manipulate the thinking and voting of people who are ignorant and who don't want to think for themselves, who depend on others to think and to tell them what to think and believe.

We have the power within us, even those of us with the poorest of education and the most dire of backgrounds. It doesn't cost a thing to use it. We just have to try.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves about subjects other than the limited ones taught in schools.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession to their character.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher and poet (1803-1882)

Think about it. That person who is so negative about the world, isn't he also a pessimist about his own future and his place in the world?

The loving mother who dotes on her children also looks on the world as a loving place, with bad guys being the exceptions not the rule.

The happy person sees happy people around him and finds happy situations even when reading world news.

The violent person can cite not just violent experiences from his own family while growing up, he can show you violence all around his community and the world.

A trusting person believes that the world operates on trust, while untrustworthy people are few.

Is your opinion of the world a confession of your character, as Emerson claimed? While the two are related directly, I believe that the relationship goes the opposite way to what Emerson stated. We see in the world people like ourselves. Those who are not like us seem to be the exceptions. When we don't see people like ourselves in our immediate world, we look for them in other places. Sometimes that means a move, a change of job or a change of partner.

Even in the face of apparently overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people will believe about the world what they want to believe. An optimistic person will see the world as a positive place. Nothing will console a negative person about what a hell-on-earth we live in and how no one should bring up a child in the present conditions.

Is the world really a great place with enormous possibilities? Or is hell something we live through each day of our lives?

It depends on what kind of person you are.

If you don't care for the world as it is, change your attitude toward yourself and those around you. You world will gradually become a marvelous place.

You don't have to take Emerson's word for it. Think about what you think of the world in general and about what you think of your own life.

It's true that life is what we make of it. It's also true that your world is what you make of it.

Live the life you want your life to be. The world around you will follow your example.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children with positive attitudes toward themselves and their world and need the tools to make it happen.
Learn more at http://billallin.com