The 14th of the 16 Guidelines For Life — principles – are the foundation for the power to take a stand about things that matter to us. Doing this makes our lives meaningful.Your principles may be easier to identify by checking what gets the fire churning in your gut. Getting upset about a persistent issue is the sign that a principle you hold strongly has been breached.
It is niggling and uncomfortable to act in a way that does not feel right, regardless of what others’ influence might be.VIDEO: Passion with Principles
Albert Schweitzer was an Alsatian German-French theologian, musician,
philosopher and physician who embraced the principle of “reverence for
life.”
“Woe to us if our sensitivity grows numb,” he wrote. “It destroys our conscience in the broadest sense of the word: the consciousness of how we should act dies.” In a famous experiment at Princeton University in 1973, a group of theology students were told to hurry to another campus building to deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan. They passed an actor lying on the ground in pain and in need of help.
In their haste to deliver a sermon on compassion, 90 per cent of the students ignored the needs of the suffering person. Some literally stepped over him.
Who are you? How can you make the best of the years you spend on this earth? We may need to abandon a narrow and self-centred view of ourselves and the world to embrace what is important to us.Try this: Take a few moments to identify what issues fire you up? What do they tell you about yourself and what is important to you?
Identify your own personal guidelines on how to think and behave. Do
you manage to live up to them? If not, what might you do about it?
Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw, director of The Centre for Compassion and Wisdom in Burlington, is coauthor of 16 Guidelines For Life, available at website centreforcompassionandwisdom.com
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