Hunger Games PSA's

updates.

Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, & demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long & its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people & grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food & for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one & no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools & robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep & pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song & die like a hero going home.”

Tecumseh

The World

http://i.imgur.com/hqnLM.jpg

School vs. Life

"The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson."

- Tom Bodett

Luck?

A 60-year-old man who has never owned a car wins a new car in a fundraising lottery. All of his friends tell him how lucky he is because now he can visit his kids and go to the market whenever he wants. 

His response is: "Lucky? Maybe yes, maybe no." 

A few weeks later, he has an accident in the new car and ends up in the hospital. His friends tell him that it is a tragedy, that he should never have driven and how unlucky it was that he won the new car. 

His response is: "Unlucky? Maybe yes, maybe no." 

While he is in the hospital, there is an electrical fire in his house. If he had been there, he surely would have died. His friends tell him how lucky he is to have been in the hospital and that he will recover from the accident but that he would have been dead if he had been at home.

His response is: "Lucky? Maybe yes, maybe no." 

Do one thing that scares you

"If you let it, life can become a simple pattern of staying in your comfort zone and never wandering out into the unknown to see what lies on the other side of its horizon. Today is Monday, the first day of the week; change your patterns, even slightly today, so that a new world can find you. Do ONE thing that scares you today, ONE thing that makes you a little nervous, ONE thing that you never thought you would do. If you do ONE thing every day you will have done 365 NEW THINGS in a year! Today, don't try to tackle everything, but please do ONE thing!"

- Jackson Kiddard, author & polymath.

We Stopped Dreaming

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc

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Beautiful Sadness

the beauty of sadness Posted: 12 Mar 2012 05:49 AM PDT (♥) “There is something beautiful in reveling in sadness. The proof is how beautiful sad songs can be. I don’t think being sad is to be avoided. It’s apathy and boredom you want to avoid. But feeling anything is good, I think.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt Sadness is something I'd like to think I spent my life trying to avoid, but there have been moments when I have reveled in it, when I have spoiled myself with it, consuming more than my share until I was too full to move. I've claimed not to want it, but I have dug in all too willingly when it was served up. I used to think this was a bad thing, my propensity for sorrow, but as I've made my way along the path to living a more positive and present life, I've learned that sadness is not something to be avoided. Rather, it is something that should be embraced, experienced, and explored.  Too often when people think about living a positive life, they imagine a life without any emotions that we typically think of as negative -- sadness, anger, frustration, fear, etc. There is this misconception of living positively that assumes that a positive life is one that includes nothing but happiness and pretty positive thoughts. While, of course, those are part of living positively, they are not the only emotions and experiences one must have to live a positively present life.  To feel anything, as the quote says above, is good. What's even better is to allow ourselves to feel what we're feeling. What used to hold me back a great deal was my valiant attempts to squash negative feelings. I desperately wanted to be happy and I believed, naively, that the way to do this was to push away all negative emotions and let happiness rise to the surface. I believed that it was sadness that was holding happiness back and if I just moved that sadness aside (even if I had to hold it back with all my strength), the happiness would come skipping on into my life. Now I know that's not how it works.  How To Experience the Beauty of Sadness 1. Accept + embrace your sadness. The first step to experiencing sadness is being willing to accept and embrace it. This can be extremely difficult to do, especially if you have a tendency to avoid negative emotions. Don't be ashamed of your sadness or feel as if you should not be experiencing it. You are entitled to feel how you want to feel -- and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. When you feel sadness, allow yourself to focus on it, understand it, and accept it for what it is. Don't judge it as good or bad; just let it be and embrace it. You are experiencing it for a reason.  2. Set your sadness free. Do not cage it in, hold it back, or restrain it in any way. As hard as it might be to just let it all out (it makes it so much more real, doesn't it?), don't hold back. Seeing those people with their flowing tears, their emotions running free, was such an inspiration to me. It made me realize that it is okay to be sad and, more importantly, it's necessary. Without setting sadness free, it remains trapped inside of us, flapping about like a bird in a cage. To experience the beauty that comes with true pain, we must set our sadness free. 3. Look for the beauty in it. It might seem elusive at first, this beauty, but don't be fooled. It is there. It is always there. Where there is sadness, there once was happiness. Look for what it is that was lost and embrace that for what it was. In the case of my aunt's service, I saw so much beauty in the sadness there because the sadness came from the positive life she had lived, the people she had loved, and the loss of her presence in the world. Focus on what was beautiful, and more importantly, what is still beautiful now.  4. Don't let others cage you. When it comes to sadness (or any emotion, really), it can be hard not to be held back worrying about what others might think when you set your emotions free, but don't let what others think (or what you think they might think) get in the way of experiencing your emotions. Even when it's hard, don't hold back because of other people. The people in your life should accept you for who you are -- and what you're feeling -- and if they don't then they're not the kind of people you want in your life anyway. 5. Bring yourself back to the now. Sadness can be beautiful, purposeful, and necessary, but it is often a result of mourning for what was or what could have been. After you have allowed yourself to experience it for a time period that seems right to you, bring yourself back to the present moment. Direct your attention to the things around you that are happy, that inspire you, that you find to be uplifting. While experience sadness is essential to living a positive life, dwelling in sadness is not. Always bring yourself back to the present and remind yourself of what's happening in this moment.  To experience true happiness, to live a truly positive life, one must experience a whole range of emotions. Rather than holding emotions back, we have to allow ourselves to feel whatever it is we must feel. We must also realize that sadness and many other negative emotions often occurs as an attachment to the past or the future. While we should allow ourselves to experience it fully, we should not indulge excessively in it. I've always been a person of extremes, which is why this lesson has been a hard one for me to learn. I used to think I had to be happy or sad, never realizing it was essential to have a balance, never understanding that it was overindulgence in sadness, not the sadness itself, that turned positives into negatives. I now know that sadness -- and any emotion -- should be allowed, embraced, and incorporated into life. Avoidance, I've found, is the key to unhappiness. Therefore, I'd encourage you to feel what you must, when you must, but I'd encourage you to do so with the five steps above in mind. Emotions, especially sadness, are powerful things and it's up to us not to avoid them or push them away but instead to find the best way to experience the beauty that comes with allowing ourselves to feel.

It comes in waves.

It comes in waves.

They wash the grit and dust of life away; so many are these rocks turned into grains that they seem to dissolve into the great blue abyss. Yet they are all there, whether they are indeed whittled down to their separate atoms or remain solid and whole and sink to the bottom of the depths. They are there. The waves pull them and push them, drawing them into the soul and gently, sometimes fiercely, pushing them back out again. They can be hurtful, or they can provide solace.. a place to rest after being lost in one’s own heart.

It is good to splendor in this partnership. The hurt and the healing, neither one nor the other can control it. But there is harmony in this balance, between what is difficult and what is right. And as the ocean changes, calms, rises and falls, the sands—in their seemingly small way—change it too.

Is the ocean scarred by sands, impure for its association with the dirt of the earth? No. Between the boundless bubbles and grounded darkness, through bonds and brokenness, together they have laid the foundation for life.

And in nurturing the beings of the world, they manifest the divine.

Amor

"Love can be hard. Love requires you to be kind when you are angry, patient when you feel anxious, compassionate when you judge others, caring when you feel apathetic, trust when you've been wronged, let go when you want to hold on, know that the other person is you, take risks when you're scared, to always see the lesson and never look back once you've decided." 
- Jackson Kiddard , author and polymath.

All in Time

"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity." 

- Henry Van Dyke, a wonderful author.