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Category Archives: inspiration
dare to be a fool
I received this in an email and just couldn’t resist posting it today because it is truth…
Every Hero Begins as Fool
In celebration of April Fool’s Day, I want to encourage you to be more “foolish” in your life. There is power in daring to be different.
Great advances have never come from the conventionally minded among us, those who worship their data, never wear purple, and chastise the unknown. Change comes from us “madcaps” who obey the mandate to be alive — and chase the gleam of inspiration, the truth we know in our bones — more than the facts that are known.
The world’s healers, industry leaders, artists and visionaries of tomorrow — are likely the neglected fools of right now, scrambling to pay their rent while devoting themselves to bold ideas and inexhaustible generosity. Let’s face it, some half-cocked chuckleheads of the past gave us electricity, medicine, automobiles, a few trips to the pale white moon and back, not to mention hair dye and decaffeinated coffee. God bless them all. Can you imagine the Wright brothers assuming they could snub the laws of gravity and fly? Think about it. Many of us cower and shrink, thinking we’re extravagant, for believing we might just write a screenplay that sells.
Fools dare to be alive, even on a Monday. Fools dare to take off their shoes, turn off the computer and walk outside into the sun. They know the power, healing, and strength of having fun. Fools dare to take off their thinking cap and try on their feelings fedora.
Fools dare to try new things and do them badly. Fools dare to rest when they are tired. Fools dare to sing off key and they dare to sing on key in a voice that melts all separation and brings sadness to its knees. Fools dare to wander down provocative paths in their lives, try scenic routes and detours and stuff their bursting satchels with jewels. Fools dare to step into the river beyond the concrete structures of “how it’s always been done,” and allow themselves to be carried onto new and holy ground.
Prudence and conservatism have not advanced our culture. It took the voices on the outskirts to make a noise that changed the world. It’s taken a handful of rabble rousers to vote for women’s rights, freedom from slavery, and to oppose war, hunger, and hatred. It takes fools to raise awareness and fools to raise the bar. It takes fools to stir the hearts of mankind into becoming the great lovers and leaders we are meant to be. Every time we watch the Academy Awards or the Olympics, I think of all the “foolish dreamers” involved who believed they had something in them that deserved commitment, development, and a jostling chance. Every hero begins as fool.
So dare the ridicule of the narrow-minded and dim-sighted. Dare to still believe. Dare to feel. Dare to trust your guiding light. Dare to ignore gravity and take flight. Dare to be a hero. Dare to be a fool.
©Copyright 2010 Tama J. Kieves. All rights reserved.
speaking of patience
Excerpted from Pema Chodron’s “The Answer to Anger & Aggression is Patience”, Shambhala Sun, March 2005.
That’s what it’s like with aggression: you can’t speak because everyone will feel the vibes. No matter what is coming out of your mouth, it’s like you’re sitting on top of a keg of dynamite and it’s vibrating.
Patience has a lot to do with getting smart at that point and just waiting: not speaking or doing anything. On the other hand, it also means being completely and totally honest with yourself about the fact that you’re furious. You’re not suppressing anything—patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. If you wait and don’t feed your discursive thought, you can be honest about the fact that you’re angry. But at the same time you can continue to let go of the internal dialogue. In that dialogue you are blaming and criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up for doing that. It’s torturous, because you feel bad about being so angry at the same time that you really are extremely angry, and you can’t drop it. It’s painful to experience such awful confusion. Still, you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and the pain that comes with it.
Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.
This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it—going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain—to just somehow get rid of that aggression—is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.
mulatto diaries 