Mikes Blog

Life’s highest beauty
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What makes life difficult is also what makes life good. Responsibility, commitment, obligation, discipline, challenge, and effort all can be tough to bear, and all are essential to a life of fulfillment.

Many of the difficulties you experience come from the other people in your life. But what a sad and empty thing your life would be if there were no other people with whom to share your world.

Other difficulties arise from the physical and biological constraints of your existence. Yet that existence itself, and the possibilities it enables, are nothing short of miraculous.

Though you cannot escape the burdens, you never have to let them wear down your spirit. You can greatly mitigate the difficulties by accepting their necessity and by making them well worth their trouble.

Accept each day and everything it brings. Embrace it all with open arms, with the commitment and determination to transform whatever you encounter into positive and purposeful living.

Life’s highest beauty is built upon life’s greatest difficulties. Add something of yourself to that beauty by the way you live today.

— Ralph Marston

Intentional attention
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Pay attention, but choose where and in what way you pay that attention. Don’t allow your attention to be stolen from you.

Know your purpose, know your values. Know your truth and your intentions.

The most insidious threats to your well being are not physical. They are mental, psychological, emotional, and they are very real, highly destructive.

Your attention is worth more to you than any amount of money. When you spend it, be sure to get something equally valuable in return.

Pay attention in ways that support and promote and nourish what’s most important to you. Fulfill the maximum potential of your attention by taking complete responsibility for it.

Pay your precious attention in ways that make you a more positive, creative, generous, fulfilled person. Pay attention with firmness and excellence in your intention, and make yourself a great life out of it.

— Ralph Marston

THE DAILY MOTIVATOR
Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Good new days
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You cannot go back to a better time. Yet you can always go forward to a better time.

When you do, you carry with you a powerful perspective. It’s a perspective expertly informed by what worked out well in the past and what didn’t.

Time moves only in one direction. If you seek to move against it you become bitter, irrelevant, and ineffective.

Choose instead to embrace each moment as it arrives. Fill it with new instances of what you know to be good, worthwhile, true and beneficial.

Don’t waste your energy wishing for another yesterday. Take yesterday’s goodness and re-imagine it for tomorrow.

The good old days are gone, yet they’ve left you with an abundance of great experience. Now put that experience to use and get to work creating some good new days.

— Ralph Marston

Be joyful
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Allow yourself to be joyful. It is as simple as that.

Strive and calculate, bend and then stand firm, execute your plans, hold fast to your intentions. And no matter what the outcome, let joy be a part of it.

The world often does not work the way you thought it would. Life surprises you in many directions, and would have scant appeal otherwise.

It is never as good as you wished, never as bad as you feared. And always there is room for as much joy as you care to give.

So give more, and then some. Depend not on things going a certain way, but upon you choosing to be a certain way.

Respect your deepest obligation and celebrate your highest privilege. Be joyful.

— Ralph Marston