Settle for the Greater Good!

I cannot really express how I feel at this very moment. Mixed emotions that is. I would like to write a blog about it but no words would come out of my head. It seems so empty. Drained. Exhausted. It must have been so, because in the past few months I have been battling with myself. Battles wherein I have never been to before. I was like a knight who lost his armor and has nothing to protect his precious life with but to trust his instincts and God-given strength.

Lately, have to make so many mind-bugling, life-altering, relatively stressful, body-burning, world-shaking decisions that would help me be certainly happy in my future existence. Moreover, in my search for words that would best describe how I feel; I come across with the following few-chosen quotations in which somehow you would know how I really felt when I was making my own decisions:

Leo Buscaglia:

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Peter McWilliams

“We can consciously end our life almost anytime we choose. This ability is an endowment, like laughing and blushing, given to no other animal… in any given moment, by not exercising the option of suicide, we are choosing to live.”

Eric Allenbaugh

Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us- and those around us, more effectively. Look for the learning.

Lewis Thomas

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way.

Norman Vincent Peale

The greatest power we have is the power of choice. It’s an actual fact that if you’ve been moping in unhappiness, you can choose to be joyous instead and, by effort, lift yourself into joy. If you tend to be fearful, you can overcome that misery by choosing to have courage. Even in darkest grief you have a choice. The whole trend and quality of anyone’s life is determined in the long run by the choices that are made.

Robert F. Bennett quotes

Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.

Douglas Pagels

Sometimes it’s important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it’s essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.

Barry Lopez:

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

C. Wright Mills:

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — and then, the opportunity to choose.

Carter Heyward:

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies.

Elaine Maxwell:

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man’s doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Kenneth Patton (adapted):

By the choices and acts of our lives, we create the person that we are and the faces that we wear. By the choices and acts of our lives we give to the world wherein our lives are lived, hoping that our neighbors will find our contributions to be of worth, and hoping that the world will be a little more gracious for our time in it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Theodore Bikel:

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Surviving and thriving as a professional today, demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension.

Les Brown

Choosing goals that are important to you is one of the most essential things you can do in order to live your dreams.

Charles Lamb

The measure of choosing well is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen.