The Greatest Weakness-Daily Meditation August 16, 2022

Today’s quotation:

The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they’re alive.-O. A. Battista

Today’s Meditation:

Oh, boy–does this one hit home.  In my lifetime people have come in and out of my life constantly, and so rarely have I told them how much I care for them and appreciate them.  Many of them I’ll never see again, and thus I’ll never have the chance to tell them what they’ve meant to me.  Many of them I still see regularly, yet I don’t tell them how much I care for them.  And this even though I know how much it means to me to hear the same thing from other people.  If it means a lot to me to hear it from others, then wouldn’t it mean a lot to others to hear it from me?

My major problem is that I’ve spent my whole life thinking that others aren’t really affected by what I think or say to them.  In short, I think that they don’t really care if I love them or not–they can get along just fine in life without ever knowing that I do love them.  As a boy and a young man, I shied away from sharing such feelings because I was sure that they just didn’t matter.  As a man, that thought is so deeply ingrained in me that I have a hard time fighting my way past it and telling people that I love them while they’re here with me.

It really is a tragedy that we don’t spend more time sharing such feelings with others.  While I’m sure there are some people who would feel awkward if I told them, as long as I’m sincere and I tell them with no expectations of anything in return, most people would appreciate being told how much they mean to me.

And telling people that we love them can help us to contribute in a very real and very positive way to the world in which we live, for the more people there are in the world who feel loved, the more people there will be in the world who are able to share the love with others.

Questions to consider:

How do you feel when someone tells you sincerely how much they appreciate, love, or care for you?

How might we make someone else feel if we were to tell them how much we love or care for them?

What kinds of obstacles keep us from sharing such feelings?

For further thought:

Always tell people how you feel about them.
If you tell them, it may break your heart, but by saying nothing you might break theirs.-unattributed