My interest is human nature. Real life
is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second
is only a part of the first. Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Sen.
Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for reelection because he'd
been diagnosed with cancer:
'No man ever said on his deathbed, I wish I had spent more time in the
office." Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last
year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."
Or what John Lennon
wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what
happens while you are busy making other plans."
There will be thousands of people
doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive
who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not
just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the
computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just
your bank account, but your soul.
People don't talk about the soul very
much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But
a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or
lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so
good.
I no longer consider myself the center
of the universe. I show up. I listen, I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my
friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you
today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call them on the phone, and
I meet them for lunch. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
I would be rotten, or at best mediocre
at my job, if those things were not true. You cannot be really first-rate at
your work if your work is all you are. So here is what I wanted to tell you
today: "Get a life." A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the
bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about
those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your
breast?
Get a life in which you notice the
smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in
which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water gap or the
way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with
her thumb and first finger.
Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail.
Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad. Get a life in which you are
generous. Look around at the azaleas in the suburban neighborhood where you grew
up: look at a full moon hanging silver in a black, black sky on a cold night.
And realize that life is the best
thing ever. And that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply
about its goodness that you want to spread it round. Once in a while take money
you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be
a big brother or sister.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our
days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of the
azaleas, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of a kid's eyes,
the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again.
It
is so easy to exist instead of live. I learned to live many years ago. I learned
to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress
rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at
all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed
in it completely and uterly.
Unknown
Writer
Life
is made up of small pleasures.
Happiness is made up of those tiny successes.
The big ones come too infrequently. And
if you don’t collect all of these tiny successes,
the big ones don’t really mean anything. Norman
Lear
Life
is an echo. What you send out, you get back. What you give,
you receive. When you bring out the best in others, you bring out
the best in yourself.
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Tim
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