2012-12-31 Fr Mamerto Menapace OSB
Balance of the
year
My
perception as I get older is that there are no bad years. There are years of
hard learning and others like a break, but they are not bad. I firmly believe
that the way a year should be evaluated would have more to do with how we were
able to love, to forgive, to laugh, to learn new things, having challenged our
egos and our attachments.
So
we should not be afraid of suffering or the dreaded failure, because both are
just instances of learning. We have a hard time understanding that life and how
to live it is up to us; how we engage with things we do not want depends only on
the cultivation of the will. If I do not like the life I have, I must develop
strategies to change it, but it is in my will power to do it. "Being happy
is a choice," let's not forget that.
Then,
with these criteria I wondered what I had to do to build a good year because we
are all in the way of learning every day to be better and to understand that we
came into this life to three things: -to learn to love -to make a mark -to be
happy. In these three things we should work every day; the issue is how and I
think there are three factors that help in these points:
·
Learning to love the responsibility as an instance of growth. The
work, paid or unpaid, dignifies the soul and spirit and makes us well on our
mental health. Now the meaning of fatigue is seen as something negative which we
should get rid of and not as the privilege of being tired because that means
we're delivering the best of us.
·
We came to this land to tire ourselves. .... We value freedom as a
way to overcome ourselves and to understand that to be free is not to do what we
want. Maybe we should exercise our freedom to do what we must with pleasure and
say that we are happily exhausted and so we can love more and better.
·
The third and final point is to cultivate the development of
willpower, that wonderful talent of being able to wait, to postpone immediate
gratification in pursuit of better things. Let us love and treat each other well
as a country and as a family, say hello in the elevators, salute the guards,
kindness to drivers of buses, smile at least once or several times a day. Loving
people. Create warmth inside our homes, workplaces, and for that there must be
food smell, crushed and even stained cushions, a disorder that acknowledges that
there is life. Our resource-independent houses are becoming too perfect that it
seems that no one lives inside.
Try
to grow spiritually, whatever the vision of it. The significance and make sense
of what we do has to do with spiritual intelligence. We try to dispense
technology and we take a step toward, to old games, to family encounters and
encounters with friends, inside the house.
We
value the intimacy, the warmth and the love within our families. If we can work
on this and I promise to try doing it, we have decreed to be happy, which does
not relieve us of problems, but makes us understand that the only difference
between someone who is happy and who is not, has nothing to do with the problems
that we have but the attitude with which we face what touches us.
They
say that when happiness is shared, it enlarges. And instead, with penalties it
goes backwards. It shrinks. Maybe what happens is that in sharing the heart
dilates. And an enlarged heart is better able to enjoy the joys and better
defended for penalties not to hurt us inside.