Start Doing -Daily Meditation for September 26, 2022
Today’s quotation:
Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.-Adam Michnik
Today’s Meditation:
Who am I? Can people tell who I am and what I believe simply by observing me? Do my ideals and values shine through in my actions? Am I behaving in a way that’s consistent with what’s truly important to me in life?
It’s easy enough to hold our beliefs about what is important without actually acting in ways that are consistent with those beliefs. It’s even easy for us to expect others to live up to our expectations and values without living up to them ourselves. But when we do that, we certainly aren’t contributing a valuable and consistent role model to our society. We aren’t going to give to the world a model of what we find to be most important in our dealings with the world.
Whether we want to believe it or not, there are many people looking to us for modeling, looking to us to see how they should act in society. And if they see us not telling the truth, they’ll find it much easier not to tell the truth themselves. If they hear us talk about the importance of helping others but never witness us helping anyone else, then what is the true message that we’re sending to them?
The beauty of making our actions match our beliefs is that when enough of us start doing so, then our societies as a whole will begin to resemble those actions. When more people start behaving decently and humanely, then the societies in which we live will become more decent and more humane. We do have the ability to affect the world, little by little, but our contribution will be null and void if we act in ways that are inconsistent with our beliefs.
Questions to consider:
Will all of your actions today reflect your most valued beliefs?
How many people do you know who live their lives in ways they think that society should be and start doing?
What effects do we have on others when our actions aren’t consistent with our beliefs?
For further thought:
Your thoughts should agree with your words, and the words
should agree with your actions. In this world, people think
one thing, say another thing, and do something else.
This is horrible. This is crookedness.-Sivananda
