Quote of the Month by William Faulkner (1897 - 1962)
"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
Make Love, Enjoy Peace
by Charlie Phillips
In 2007, when I started a webpage at the suggestion of a friend to put up some
of the essays I had written, I just jumped into it and have made changes as we
went along. One of the first things we did was to start putting up a different
quote each week. I have always liked and collected quotes and thought it would
be interesting. The quote or title of this page was the first one I put up.
I would like to look at this a little closer. It came to me when a friend sent me something with the famous quote of the sixties: “make love, not war”. I have come to realize that what we resist persists. I also saw some other material in which the authors talked about how we have taken the wrong approach to this whole thing, so I thought the above quote was a better choice.
Now in the sixties, the slogan applied to sex, which I think many have tried even to this day to substitute for love. That’s not to say sex is not a part of love, because it definitely is. When I said “make love”, I was referring to the spiritual aspect of it. Instead of being against something, let’s love the thing that would eliminate that which we don’t want. The whole idea is to focus on the positive, not the negative.
So as in the case of the above, instead of being against war, let’s be for peace. I think it makes more sense as that is a positive instead of a negative. The more on the positive we can stay, the happier our lives will be.
Having said that, life teaches us that it’s not quite that simple; we get caught up in everyday life and its dramas. When something doesn’t go the way we were planning on, it is difficult to just let go and accept that what has happened is for the greater good. We, or maybe I should say I find myself at times in a funk because things haven’t gone as planned, or hoped.
Perhaps that’s the problem; we were wanting or hoping something would turn out the way we were thinking. Instead, what the universe gave us is what we were concentrating on and that is more want or more hope. This gets back to our changing how we think about things. Instead of wishing or hoping for something, instead of saying, “I hope I can overcome it” we need to change it to, “I will overcome this challenge”.
I started to say that it’s not quite as easy as just throwing a switch, but that is exactly what we should do. We should be more aware of what we say and when we catch ourselves starting to use words like want, hope and need, we need to consciously throw the switch to: I will have, it is possible, and/or it will be nice to have. Personally, I am working hard toward that goal because the way I have done it in the past hasn’t worked too well for me. And it’s not just me; just look around at the shape this world is in. I believe the time has come to, as Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world”.
Charlie
I would like to look at this a little closer. It came to me when a friend sent me something with the famous quote of the sixties: “make love, not war”. I have come to realize that what we resist persists. I also saw some other material in which the authors talked about how we have taken the wrong approach to this whole thing, so I thought the above quote was a better choice.
Now in the sixties, the slogan applied to sex, which I think many have tried even to this day to substitute for love. That’s not to say sex is not a part of love, because it definitely is. When I said “make love”, I was referring to the spiritual aspect of it. Instead of being against something, let’s love the thing that would eliminate that which we don’t want. The whole idea is to focus on the positive, not the negative.
So as in the case of the above, instead of being against war, let’s be for peace. I think it makes more sense as that is a positive instead of a negative. The more on the positive we can stay, the happier our lives will be.
Having said that, life teaches us that it’s not quite that simple; we get caught up in everyday life and its dramas. When something doesn’t go the way we were planning on, it is difficult to just let go and accept that what has happened is for the greater good. We, or maybe I should say I find myself at times in a funk because things haven’t gone as planned, or hoped.
Perhaps that’s the problem; we were wanting or hoping something would turn out the way we were thinking. Instead, what the universe gave us is what we were concentrating on and that is more want or more hope. This gets back to our changing how we think about things. Instead of wishing or hoping for something, instead of saying, “I hope I can overcome it” we need to change it to, “I will overcome this challenge”.
I started to say that it’s not quite as easy as just throwing a switch, but that is exactly what we should do. We should be more aware of what we say and when we catch ourselves starting to use words like want, hope and need, we need to consciously throw the switch to: I will have, it is possible, and/or it will be nice to have. Personally, I am working hard toward that goal because the way I have done it in the past hasn’t worked too well for me. And it’s not just me; just look around at the shape this world is in. I believe the time has come to, as Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world”.
Charlie