Giant Quote From One Of My Favourite Human Beings I Have Never Met:
Gordon Livingston is someone I consider to be a hero. His website is here: http://www.gordonlivingston.com/
I have read the following books of his:
1: Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart (Thirty True Things You Need To Know Now)
2: And Never Stop Dancing (Thirty More True Things You Need To Know Now)
3: How To Love
I am currently reading:
The Thing You Think You Cannot Do (thirty truths about fear and courage)
The brackets are the subtitles. These books are amazing. Gordon is amazing. If you ever want to learn valuable lessons on life read these. If you have ever felt pain, heartbreak, sorrow, or loss, read these. If you have ever experienced happiness, joy, laughter, togetherness, read these. If you are a human being: read these.
I could write for days about why I think this man is so fantastic, and I would love it, but what I'm going to do instead is type out a giant quote from his book on courage and hope nobody sues me for copyright infringement!
Here goes:
Chapter 4: You have never suffered enough.
'The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.' - David Foster Wallace
"Those who have suffered a catastrophic loss, such as the death of a child or spouse, often take slender consolation in the idea that they have 'paid their dues' to God or to the universe and that no more sacrifices of this magnitude will be required of them. I indulged this fantasy for a time after my twenty-two-year-old son Andrew killed himself in the grip of bipolar illness some years ago. Sure, I thought, no further misfortune could befall me that would approach this. Seven months after Andrew's death, my six year-old-son Lucas was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of leukemia. Six months later he too was dead.
What can we learn from such apparently random devastation? That there is no defense against the vagaries of chance in this life? That we are being tested by having our worst fears realized? That we need more lessons on powerlessness and humility? I couldn't figure it out. Then it began to dawn on me that there is nothing to figure out, that as Robert Frost (who lost four of his six children) said in his old age, 'In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life - it goes on.' Such a conviction is at once both defenseless and liberating.
Nobody tells us when we are young that there are no limits to pain. Instead, most of us are allowed to indulge the fantasy that if we do well in school, work hard, and respect authority, we will be spared the crushing grief that is the fate of other people, those we don't know. It is doubtless just as well that we are not burdened with the gift of foresight. In the yearbook marking my fiftieth college reunion, I closed my brief autobiography with the paraphrase of a favourite song, 'I wish somehow I didn't know now what I didn't know then.'
A subset of the category we label 'courage' is resilience, the capacity to respond to adversity with a determination not to be defeated by it. Anyone who has attended a meeting of The Compassionate Friends, an organization of bereaved parents, learns that people vary widely in their reactions to grief. About one-third of those who have sustained such a loss appear defeated by it. Their best hopes have been burned to ashes and they will never recover. For another third, time will do its work and they will struggle back to some semblance of their former selves. How long this process takes is individual and unpredictable. A third group manifests the reality proposed by Ernest Hemingway: 'The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, some are strong at the broken places.' These are the people who plant gardens, establish the memorial funds, accompany others in their mourning. They are more than survivors; they have prevailed."
The chapter goes on but that's a big enough quote. Now tell me, is it possible to read this and walk away like it had no meaning and no relation to you or your life?
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