Reflection
To live with awareness and to embrace our ability to feel is to experience life more fully. It opens us to both joy and sorrow. We cannot have one without the other. The sensitivity that enables us to love also intensifies our suffering when we endure loss. It is our capacity to feel that uncovers the meaning of our experiences. To deny it or attempt to submerge it distorts our humanity. The ability to feel deeply is what gives life its richness and opens its beauty.
Prayer
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139
Action
Reflect on how you react in times of sorrow or happiness. What do you understand about yourself?
Suggested Readings
These things I command you, that you love one another.
John 15:17
For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.
Corinthians 14:33–1
Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.
Niccolò Machiavelli
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie
He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
Samuel Johnso
He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Jung
Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.
Samuel Ullman
Feelings do not grow old along with the body. Feelings form part of a world I don’t know, but it’s a world where there’s no time, so space, no frontiers.
Paulo Coelho