Sucking the marrow out of life doesn't mean choking on the bone.
Through difficult experiences, life sometimes becomes more meaningful.
I have a pretty amazing life. Even back-to-back deployments - Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey - it's still pretty rewarding.
Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.
Part of the reason I went to college was that I wanted to fade out peacefully: show everybody I had gone through something that was quite challenging and difficult but did so with grace and poise and got an education.
I'm attracted to things that are challenging and fun and interesting, and it certainly seems that audiences enjoy them as well.
Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.
At some point in your career, maybe you, too, have made the life-altering decision to start anew. If so, you know first-hand how exciting, challenging, and sometimes disorienting the first 30, 60, 90 days can be.
When people are around us, they should leave better off than they were previously. Rather than feeling discouraged or defeated, people should feel challenged and inspired after spending any time with you and me.
It's been a hell of a roller-coaster ride for me.
Learning is the property of those who fear to do disagreeable things.
Maybe it's good to be traumatized in your youth, to make you think differently and step outside the box. Anybody can be comfortable, but if you get your world rocked, shaken as it were, then maybe it causes you to really go to a whole other level in a different way.
I used to work with mentally disabled people when I was 18 or 19, changing diapers and catheters. I was working, like, 16 hour night shifts, having to distribute meds and go capture people who would break out of the house. Sometimes they'd have seizures, and we'd have to rush them to the hospital. That was an interesting time, very humbling.
It's been a tough year. . . Someone said I should send out Buddhist thank-you cards since Buddhists believe that anything that challenges you makes you pull yourself together.
The essence of our whole path is in that place of discomfort, and what do we do with it?
It is a law of nature that you must do difficult things to gain strength and power. As with working out, after a while you make the connection between doing difficult things and the benefits you get from doing them, and you come to look forward to doing these difficult things.
The ability to get to a higher level in our life means that we have to generate the energy to be able to do so, and generally, we do that by a fall. Spiritual advances are almost always proceeded by a fall of one kind or another.
The lows have been frustrating, and very challenging times, but the highs have been phenomenal.
Have you ever played a video game that didn't have escalating levels of difficulty? Well, life can feel like play, too, when we purposefully engage in activities that demand we test and develop our skills.
My career is a journey for me, and any journey is incomplete without the struggle.
I spent a lot of time playing in miserable places that were not a lot of fun. Somebody once said it is character building and I was like: My character is just fine.
I mean God knows I've done tons of schlock during the course of my career and stuff that's been very low budget and really pressed for time, but I've never had an experience like this. I kept saying to people, "How do you do this?" I said to Susan [Lucci], "How do you do it?" I don't recall exactly what she answered me but it was something like "Close my eyes and think of England. You just do it."
Life is a series of waves to be embraced and overcome.
As a teenager, I was in the Carlisle schoolboy scheme and while I was excited to join at first, I look back on it as a tough few years.
Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning hand springs or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it.
