The King!!!

In a successful attempt to not fall asleep while waiting for the next class, I listened to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech that he held in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on the 28^th August 1963. To be honest, I was moved. I listened to it mainly for its rhetoric value at first… but then it got me thinking… again.

If you followed this blog for some time now, you have probably read that I adopted a more idealistic point of view on the world. I talked about how we can reasonably have a positive impact on the world around us. I have talked about being pragmatic, but at the same time having an idealistic stance. I have talked about having an efficient impact, by not wasting energy on lost causes.
This is all pretty good. It is definitely helpful to approach idealism like that. But it is by far not enough.
I realized that after having listened to Mr. Kings speech. It is not enough to not be realistic and pragmatic. It is not enough to stick to what is possible. It is not enough to talk about how the world can be better and then settle for buying T-Shirts that are not produced by children.
One man can change the world. One man can have an impact that makes the world more like the world we want to live in. Mr. King has taught me that more than any other person. This is in fact the difference between good and great.
I have been good so far. I have always known what is going wrong in the world. I had many discussions on what goes wrong. I was open to opinions of others on what goes wrong and included their view in my image of the world as far as it made sense. I was concerned by the problems of the world.
But I did not do anything with that knowledge. I was content to raise awareness and teach people around me. When I did not convince someone, I was satisfied by saying that this was another environment and that I, coming from the university, could not understand that environment (for example when I was working on the farm). The word that is missing here, as you might have guessed already, is the word action. Knowing what goes wrong, I never made the step towards how to change it. Because it is a difficult step. A step that only great people made, a step that great people made against all odds, against difficulties, against people opposing them. And that’s why they are different from the good people, that’s why they are great.

The question that looms in my head ever since I heard the speech: What do I stand for? This question bothers me, because I have no answer. I have not made a stance for an issue, I have not had an impact just yet. But I will not rest until I have found what I can put into action, what I can do as agent of positive change. The opportunities will come. The moment where I will have to decide to go from good to great will come. The moment where I will put some action to my knowledge will come. And I am looking forward to this happening.

So far so good, but what about you? What do you stand for?

Cheers
Stefan

Introducing the book (repost)

actually, somehow that looks strikingly similar to what I have seen sometimes... ;-)

The road to success

True Colors - Phil Collins

I actually like this version a bit better than the original by Cindy Lauper... but the song is wonderful in both versions... (and the gazillion remakes...)

Blessid Union Of Souls - I believe

wow... another beautiful song found on my harddisk...

The craziest play in Football history

Well, if you like football, you gonna love this play... even if you love the sport for the precision, it's just another proof for the fact that if you do not give up, you can change the game in the very last second...

Never, never, never, never, never give up!!!

Happiness

Hello friends...

Last week I was in Bern at the train station waiting for a friend of mine and I did what I always do: I observe people. And then one thing struck me: It is extraordinary how few people walk through their lives with a smile on their faces. About 90 % of the people passing by had a sad look on their faces. This motivated me to write the following post:

I mentioned the theory of happiness already in the Good Blogger, Bad Blogger post. So this is just an addition and a clarification to it:
It is basically just one statement:

You can be happy whenever you choose to be. The only person that interferes with you being happy is yourself, i.e. when you choose not to be. The circumstances have no influence on how happy you feel. The decisive point is how you treat these circumstances. Why is that so?

1. This sounds lame, but everything has its good and bad sides. Nothing in this world is only good or only bad. The effects of every event or action can be seen from at least two sides. If you ever encounter something that is uniquely good, then you just did not search hard enough to find the other side and vice versa. Now if you face life with this type of thougth and stay in a positive thought, you will never stop until you found the good in what is happening around you.
2. I for my part was very afraid of failure before. Then I realized that my most wonderful thoughts I have had when I lived through difficult times. I wondered why that might be. And it was pretty obvious that if we fail on something or something bad happens to us, we have to go back and rethink ourselves. We have to redefine ourselves, search for a new identity because we don’t want to identify ourselves with this loss or the failure. That’s why we get to know us better in difficult times and that’s when we learn most. Now this is a wonderful thing. And that’s why I know now that happiness is choice.
3. The third thing is that we have always to believe that the positive thing will happen save that we have conclusive evidence that the bad thing will happen. I mean why would we want to waste our energy thinking that something bad happens? If we constantly think about the bad things, we will eventually act towards it. So we bring it in existence, which we clearly don’t want… If we do it with the positive, then it has the same effect. Now this does not mean that we have to walk blindly into the future. If there is conclusive evidence, we have to act against the bad, but as long as there is no evidence, we should not invest our energy in something that we don’t want to happen.

This is the complete theory of happiness. I live up to it... but again for me it is easy right now as there are only good things happening. I pray that you will have the same luck at some point in your life.

Cheers
Stefan