Nobody says you must laugh, but a sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate the unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and smile through the day.

-Ann Landers

A sense of humor can get you through a lot.  Sometimes things get very serious and that's when you need a good laugh the most.

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

-Sir Edmund Hillary

Achievement can be considered the pinnacle of effort.  That which you have strived for, worked for, endured much, promised little and sacrificed to accomplish all becomes secondary to the pride and joy that comes with Achievement.  You’ve done it!  All feats, great and small bring with them a sense of satisfaction.  Once you’ve experienced that sense of wonder and awe at your own abilities you will finally understand what it means to be self-reliant, resilient, and persistent.  Picking a goal and powering through what life gives you to accomplish that goal has no substitute. 

Once you have reached that level of accomplishment and know what it takes to get there, you must push yourself even further.  You may have heard the old cliché “don’t rest on your laurels.”  Well basically that means you need to keep challenging yourself.  If you don’t, your achievement will fade.  I believe a fundamental goal in life should be to continually strive and push yourself to achieve ever greater accomplishments.  I can tell you personally, after 4 years, I’ve finally finished my Master’s degree.  I just received my diploma in the mail and it is now hanging on my office wall.  It means a lot to me, because I went through a lot, professionally and personally while trying to achieve that goal of getting my degree.  Now that I’m finished, I’m thinking of what my next challenge should be. 

Sir Edmund Hillary’s quote is quite apt, at least for me, but at the same time, I’m reminded of that little ditty we’d sing when we were kids “…The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain… to see what he could see.  He saw another mountain, he saw another mountain, he saw another mountain, so guess what he did.  The bear went over the mountain…”  Life is full of mountains.  Go climb them, and conquer!

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

Hennry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sometimes, we make a quick judgment about someone and decide they just aren’t worth our time.  Their disposition and demeanor seem to be so outside our comfort zone we can’t relate.  It may be however, that we’ve only misinterpreted them.  People sometimes present themselves as hard and unlikable simply because they are unhappy.  That doesn’t mean they’re not worth knowing.

www.myeccentrictees.com site information and similar sites

www.myeccentrictees.com site information and similar sites

Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.

Joanne Kathleen Rowling

Recovering from something traumatic, stressful, tiresome, profound or troubling can take a lot of time and effort.  It is possible.  Understanding, Acceptance and Perseverance can lead to recovery.  As simple as it is to say those steps, it’s infinitely harder to actually take them.  But Understanding is about having knowledge and wisdom together and using them concurrently.  What do you think?    

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

In your life, you will be confronted with a myriad of choices and decisions.  I doubt it’s possible to accurately equate just how many choices you will make in your lifetime, but I think it’s safe to say out of the ones you’ve already made you’ve probably made some pretty big mistakes.  I’m not talking about the minor, insignificant ones.  You know, “Oh, I took a wrong turn and now we have to sit in traffic” or “Oops, I burned the toast.”  I’m talking about the whoppers.  The huge ones that change the course of your life and make you re-evaluate everything, or almost everything. 

You must understand, though, mistakes may feel like the end of the world, but they are not.  Granted some people make massive mistakes that take years to recover from.  Other people seem to never learn from their mistakes and are doomed to repeat them, over and over and over.  Sometimes, those nagging, backbreaking, sorrowful mistakes make you question your value and worth.  Sometimes those mistakes make you feel defeated and lost.  Even worse, sometimes your mistakes affect more than yourself.  Other people are hurt, or made to suffer.  It’s a terrible thing to have to live with knowing you cause someone’s death, or injury, or loss.  But it’s not the end of the world.  Want to know how I know?

Learning from our mistakes makes us better people.  If you take the time to actually sit down, examine the whole situation and figure out what went wrong, where and when, you can find a lesson to take you through the sorrow and pain of that mistake.  Beware though!  If you chose to ignore the mistake or actively deny it, the crisis or chaos that came with it the first time will happen again.  Don’t let that happen.  I’ve made some really big whoppers of mistakes, but I’ve honestly tried to learn from them.  For the most part I’ve been successful at learning from them.  You can too, you just have to be willing to Learn!  

PS: The title of this post is a quote from James Joyce.  I thought it was pretty apt.  Check out some of his books at amazon http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=James%20Joyce&tag=starlingtechnolo&index=books&link_code=qs

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

Words once spoken by Henry David Thoreau

To me, that statement has special meaning.  I’m a dreamer first and foremost.  Yes I can get things done and be routinely diligent in my responsibilities, but left to my own devices I’d have my head in the clouds.  So actually following my dreams to make my life what I’ve always imagined is a great thought to live by.  What do you think?

PS: Originally found this picture from the following url: http://www.everything-beautiful.com/dream/ there's a great poem that goes along with it.  Check it out!