One of my life’s goals is to add life to my years.  I believe we can help one another enormously in the task of becoming and staying alive and human.  Life teaches something to every one of us, and we should share our humanity with one another much more than we do.

My list of favorite insights includes the following:

1)    The value of emotions – People with powerful emotions may have more than their share of pain and problems.  But the emotions with which we are endowed are full of promise, waiting to become the bridge to deep human satisfactions.  Our human choice is between the pain of loving and the pain of not loving.

2)    The role of honest humility – What a blessing to discover that we don’t have to be as clever, intelligent, successful, popular, athletic or as famous as we thought we had to be!  Humility is not only the willingness to be what I am.  It is also the willingness to do what I can. It is the work of a lifetime.

3)    The cultivation of a sense of wonder – At every stage of growth we have to give up an old security and accept a new risk, a new challenge.  If we don’t we’ll decay.  We will in some way die.  Why are there so many vivacious and brilliant children and so many dull adults?  The loss of the sense of wonder has something to do with this decline into dullness.  To wonder is to recognize that you are in the presence of mystery.

4)    The necessity of delight – People who maintain the capacity to wonder at the realities which surround them will be keeping themselves open to the delights of being lovingly in touch with the real.  Such delights, which will often be as quiet and unnoticed as breathing or watching people won’t take all the pain and sorrow out of our lives.  But they will make the pain and sorrow worthwhile and much more humanly tolerable and creative.

5)    The art of self-knowledge - One of the key quests of our lives is to discover who we are.  Many pressures result when we don’t know who we are, or when we try to become an impossible person.

6)    The primacy of love – The truest, deepest, most important, most revealing and most astounding thing that anyone can say about you is this:  You are made to love and to be loved.  Love is your profoundest destiny, your loftiest possibility, and your surest source of happiness.  Love is your I. D. card and your passport to human fulfillment.

7)    A philosophy of frustration – We can read the daily paper or our own daily heart and see that life is full of contradiction, frustration, adversity, failure, limitation, suffering and absurdity.  These ingredients are the cause of most of the pressures we must wrestle with.  That’s why everyone needs a philosophy of pain, a philosophy of frustration.

8)    The ability to cope with the dark hours – “Do not look back in anger,” goes a word of advice, “not forward in fear, but around in awareness.”   People of hope, triumphing over the dark hours, live in the present linked with their brothers and sisters, borrowing light from the past and courage from the potential of the times ahead.

We need to keep noticing people and things in their uniqueness if we are to stay as alive as possible to the real world.