You are in command of your happiness. You have to make it happen and not wait for it to happen and one way to do that is ask what can you do that will make tomorrow better than today.
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Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Good things come to those who believe
“Good
things come to those who believe, better things come to those who are patient,
and the best things come to those who don’t give up.”
Prayer is not asking.
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the
soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a
heart without words than words without a heart.” Mahatma Gandhi
and remember to be happy.
Das Leben ist eine Fremdsprache
“Das Leben ist eine Fremdsprache. Alle Menschen
sprechen es falsch aus.”
Translation:
”Life is a foreign language. All human beings mispronounce it.”
Never be afraid
Never be
afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals
built the Titanic
Great advice
“Hate the sin, love the sinner.” Mahatma
Gandhi
Look, I put a nice photo of waves coming in, it's one of my favorite things, relax be happy and enjoy
In everyone’s life
“In
everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into
flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for
those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” Albert Schweitzer
Here. look at this laugh because it's good for you
Yeah!
"Have intense and unfailing love for one
another, for love covers a multitude of sins." -1 Peter 4:8”
You must not lose faith in humanity
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity
is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not
become dirty.” Mahatma Gandhi
A word of encouragement
A word of encouragement after failure is worth
more than an hour of praise after success.
Here, take a second to watch the sun go down and relax, it's good for you
The cathartic experience
Back home after two weeks in
Ireland and still recuperating from a bad flu I caught over there. I suspect I
got it on one of the buses we took to get across the country. We opted not to
drive; the steering wheel is on the opposite side and we weren’t sure we should
risk an accident on vacation, although now I regret that decision since a car
is faster and less expensive way to get around the country that is so small.
To my knowledge I am the first
in my entire family to return there since my relatives left there for America
just over one hundred years ago. And the
roots in Ireland are deep. We are four generation in America and several
hundred in Ireland.
Overall the trip was a cathartic
experience for me.
Cathartic. Do you know the word? It comes to us from the
Greek word kathartikos, the combination of two other words meaning cleansing
and a purification process that has now come to mean the intellectual
clarification of a concept brought into
consciousness.
I strive to make the cathartic
experience a normal and reoccurring part
of my evolutionary transformation because the cathartic experience heals
us, it purifies us by getting rid of all of the harmful specks from our hearts
and minds and brings us back to a previous status before we were sidetracked by
whatever experience we needed to purge from ourselves, from those things that
center us and bring us to a better understanding, a fuller understanding, of
who we are.
The cathartic experience is an ancient practice
in most of the world’s religions where the act of purification is fulfilled
with the help of water, blood, fire, change of clothes, and sacrifice. Those
rituals, in fact the entire cathartic experience itself are intended to be a healing
practice. So when the cathartic experience comes,
whether I like what it delivers or not I embrace it and then carry on.
In Ireland I realized how
courageous and how much grit and self-respect my ancestors who left for America
truly had. I also realized I really have
nothing in common with the Irish or with Ireland itself and decided to distance
myself from all things Irish and to embrace my American roots.
It’s no small thing for me to
distance myself from my Celtic roots. Growing up poor without any family, my American- Irish roots gave me an anchor to
clutch, a way to kept from becoming lost in vast world of rootlessness. And
that sense of detachment from anything solid, anything good and permanent is
one major reason why so many orphans fail in life. So for me, letting go of this small part of me
isn’t a loss rather I take it as a sign that I am betting and sound footing in
my life.
Fugget about it!
I have to give myself that advice on a regular basis.
Be strong and forgive those who
have trespassed against you or generally pissed you off. Forgiveness is what
strong, well-adjusted people do. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the
attribute of the strong.
This is one of those life skill
things with a long list of benefits for you that include developing inner maturity, freedom from emotional
bondage to others and practice in the fine art of leaning to move on with your
life.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean you
are supposed to transform into a wet rag and let people walk all over you. You
should always remember to be aware of those persons you are forgiving, if they
hurt you once they may do it again. In fact, they probably will hurt you
again. So be aware but lose the
resentment you hold against them. You
don’t have to be nice about it, dependency,
the main factor in abusive relationships, is often perpetuated by being nice. So be
aware, use caution, forgive and move along.
Everyone, no matter who or what they are, makes mistakes.
Everyone, no matter who or what
they are, makes mistakes. However learning from those mistakes is something
very few people do. So take time and examine the mistake and find the lesson in
it. It may not be a profound lesson since most mistakes aren’t profound but
that isn’t the point. The point in examining your mistakes is to get into the
habit of taking blame for what is yours and no tossing the blame on others. By
taking on what is yours you learn, you grow and become better than you are now.
So take time and examine the mistake and find the lesson in it.
Failure is what we allow to happen.
Failure is what we allow to
happen.
The theme of my life is get
back up after I’ve been knocked down, to bounce back from inevitable failure. I’ve
been knocked down a lot over the years and I’ve in the process I’ve learned a
thing or two about the subject so here’s my advice; Learn to survive failure
Failure services a purpose. For
one thing it confronting failure directing and not by protecting ourselves from
it gives us self-confidence that lasts. Confronting failure also teaches us how
to survive failure.
It’s a lesson worth learning
because the possibility of failure in everyday life is tremendous. Each time we
reach out to another person its risk, the risk of involvement. To love someone is
to risk not being loved in return. When we feel passionately about a cause we
risk hope. When we strive for anything, large or small, we risk failure.
Still in all, risk is good because
the only other option is to have an empty live …no hope, no joy, no love….we
also end up with nothing worth having because of the path we’ve chosen to take
by living a life filled with discouragement, bitterness. A life without trust, a life without vision
and dreams. And perhaps all of this has happened to us because we have failed
at surviving failure.
We fail at surviving failure
because our concept of what failure is. It took me four decades to understand
this simple fact…. failure is not a circumstance. Circumstance in a person’s
life are often beyond their control. Nor is failure determined by life mistakes
like a failed marriage, an addiction and so on. Life circumstances and life
mistakes just happen and people bounce back from them all the time. Rather it
is how we respond to those two things that determine failure. We fail when we give up in the face of poverty,
loneliness, anger, drugs and so on. We fail when we let circumstances control
us instead (After you’ve got up off of the canvas) to control them.
Don’t fail at surviving
failure. Have a happy and successful
life and learn how to handle failure because your response to failure
determines your destiny. Virtually every
great person in the history of the world has failed and what made them great
was that they learned how to come back from failure. They understood that
failure means nothing and that their steadfast refusal to accept failure as a permanent
condition means everything. In the words of Winston Churchill, "It is the
courage to continue that counts."
Learn to bounce back and
understand that bounce back doesn’t have much to do with blind optimism. Rather
the key in bouncing back is to fully experience your feeling in any situation, good
or bad and put them in prospective. In other words one bad day is not the end
of the world and one great day won’t mean much a day later. They are just
feeling about something. Control them and don’t let them control you.
Be an optimist but realistically
optimistic. Learn to combine the positive outlook of an optimist with the
critical thinking of a pessimists. Banish negative what-ifs. They only lead to
fear and will hold you back. Create enough negative what-ifs and you can talk yourself
out of anything including all of your dreams.
Don’t accept the situation for
what it look likes. Be creative. Have as many back up plans as you can to face
any situation…including walking away. But
remember that owning up to failures and coping with thier aftermath will force
you to come up with new ideas and strategies that might work the next time….and
there WILL be a next. Remember it’s a learning experience. Setbacks and
challenges can be our most powerful learning opportunities.
Build a social support system
to help you get back up again. Have people you can talk to.
Stay positive. Successful
people are positive people they take notice and appreciate the hundreds of miracles
that we come across in the course of a day. Find the positive and tap into it.
Count your little victories because acknowledging you’re little and seemingly
insignificant victories will keep you from deciding that “Everything that can
go wrong has gone wrong” because that’s an overreaction and it never happens.
Embrace the almost, the near win, especially if your just starting out because
it takes decades to create a masterpiece.
Be grateful and practice gratitude
because among other things gratitude boosts your mental health and well-being.
No one is an island
Before you wander out into the
world today or tomorrow consider this; a
lot of people you come across, whether you engage them or not, see
themselves as the center of the universe and judge everything as it relates to
that. In their world, you and me and
everyone else are essentially decorations to their existence, back up actors
and bit players on their stage of life.
A lot of people……..to be clear I
used the words a lot of people, not
all people…… see themselves as the center of the universe and work on the assumption
that all of their actions will cause other
people to think about them. For these folks, all things emanate from them and people are allowed into
their world, their solitary island of self, only when it is convenient and
useful.
So the question is, if a lot of people are behaving this way
shouldn’t you do the same? Shouldn’t you behave that way as well? Isn’t that
the best way to protect yourself?
The answer is no. Just because other
are brain dead doesn’t mean you have to join them. Be aware of this way of this
way of thinking but avoid thinking that way.
The stuff of life isn’t about convenience nor are we intended to roam
through our lives on a solitary island because there is no happiness in that. We
should create our own happiness and a large part of that happiness should be brought
to us by others. People, with all of their failing and annoyances, are not decorations
sent down from above to make us feel better about ourselves. They are sent to
us as gift to increase our happiness. Share your island. Be happy.
Several things I plan to do today:
I’m going to get easily bored.
I’m going to take a risk, even a small one.
I very much intend to color outside the lines.
I’m going to think with my heart first on several occasions.
I’ll make a lot of mistakes. I don’t want to but you can’t do
any of the above without making mistakes.
I will continue my secret campaign of breaking rules and my
small war with authority will continue.
Once again, try as I might, I will not work well with
others.
I’m going to change my mind…..a lot.
I will be eccentric. (Thank God)
I will continue to create enormous dreams.
A big blog of Irish Literature: Literary Dublin
A big blog of Irish Literature: Literary Dublin: A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, a...
September 1974 and September 1984
Forty years ago.
I remember taking this picture. It doesn't seem like yesterday, but it sure doesn't seem like forty year ago either.
That dark stuff on my face was the makings of a beard that never really grew.
This picture was taken in Lima Peru when I visited there in September of 1984. I remember that tie pin, in fact, I even remember that tie.
The Galway Rail Station.
Several of my ancestors left Ireland for America from this station in the 1890's. From here, they took the Ferry to Liverpool and then to the States. I repeated a small part of the journey (Galway to Dublin) although, I'm sure, in much more comfortable circumstances. They were brave people.
Parts of the original station still survive.
The station opened on 1 August 1851, making Galway the
western terminus of the Midland Great Western Railway giving the city a direct
main line to Broadstone Station terminus in Dublin. As the 19th century progressed the rail
network in Connacht was expanded, making Galway an important railhead.
Classic: Peter Oliver's Corner House
I thought you might enjoy seeing this. A family run pub in
the village of Ardara, Donegal, voted Ireland’s best pub, which considering the
incredible number of pubs in Ireland, is no small thing.
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