The Secret of How To Be Successful and The Meaning of Life

Posted 7/06/2008 by smartblackboy in Labels: , , , , ,



A wise man once said that
"success shouldn't be measured by the status you have attained, but by the distance between where you have started and where you are now."
Many of Art Star's readers have started high and stayed high.

A few of us started in the gutter.

Some of us started high, went low, and are trying to get high again.

Last night, I was talking to an old friend and we were celebrating her new position at a local paper.

I told her how proud I was of her accomplishment and her success.

I told her that I remembered from where she started.

I told her that I remembered those moments of desperation where it seemed easier to end one's life than to continue living isolated, confused, and hopeless.

She started to tear up as I told her how I remembered years ago, talking to her all night, even though I had a test the next day, trying to convince her that this life was still worth living.

I confess that I made a D on that test.

However, I learned such an important lesson that night. I learned that the ability to impact and change a person's life is far more important than material wealth, status, rank, or perceived power.

Even in the face of school, jobs, passions, hobbies, etc; we cannot ever forget who we are and whose we are.

We cannot forget that God has called us to love.

It seems so simple.

Today, a friend asked me what I thought the meaning of life was and I replied to her:

All we have to do in this world is love.

Yet, it is one of the hardest things for us to do.

This is because we all start at a place of selfishness.

We live in "I" centered worlds, and our entire society reinforces the supremacy of "me".

So, it is not surprising that truly loving God, other people, and even ourselves is so difficult for many of us to do.

To love we must lose control. We must have faith in God. Faith in other people. Faith in ourselves. We must listen. We must try to understand people who are so different than us.

Loving involves sacrifice. It is often private. It is sometimes unpopular. It can be risky. It can hurt.

However, a rabbi once said
"what the world needs now is sanity. Sanity is the ability to oscillate between soul and joy, between love and hate, between high wisdom and simple things...and the sanest thing we can do in this world right now is to love outright."
Everyday we should ask ourselves, "Today, how well did I love my God, how well did I love myself, how well did I love other people?"

Everyday we should strive to learn how to love just a little bit better than the day before that, the month before that, the year before that.

Then, at the end of our lives, when we look back at the distance between where we started and where we ended up - we will see that our life has, indeed, been truly successful.

Amen.

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