Wisdom: Thinking; Wisdom; Charactrer Molding; Earnestness; Be Proactive

This is the third and the last installment of the English translation of the Wisdom series on positive attitudes. If you recall, they are presented in three installments of 3, 4, and now, 5 images, making a dozen. I hope you are able to benefit as much from these distilled lessons of life, and adopt them as your life-long guide, in combination with others that you may have picked up along the way. Definitely these do not have a exclusive claim on the “how-to” of handling what life will throw at you, but they will constitute a handy supplementary toolset to frame your philosophical outlook on life. I’am also appending a couple of quotes on positive thinking that I have picked up from the Mar/Apr 2006 issue of Positive Thinking, just to show that there is more than one way to express similar thoughts: different forms, same message.


Thinking
Reading expands life’s horizon;
Thinking sublimates life’s quality.



Wisdom
What you encounter does not determine your life as much as how you respond to the encounter.


Character Molding
Waves become turbulent when their forward march is resisted by underwater reefs;
We become toughened when our mettle is tested by adverse circumstances.

Earnestness
Do not underestimate the significance of what you are doing now,
If you have put in your best efforts in everything you do, all will add up to manifest in opportunities.

Be Proactive
We are all endowed with different capabilities.
At the same time, we are handicapped by weaknesses to varying degree.
The proactive among us leverages on our strengths while the passive among us only laments about our weaknesses.

Last Friday, we received an USPS package from our D at Oregon. And the manner in which it was received was, well, unorthodox, as the mails are normally deposited in assigned mail boxes located on the ground floor of our block. You see, through our three years here we have got to know our postman, and apparently, vice versa, so well that mails destined for us with incomplete addresses, like missing the unit number, or missing the apartment complex number for one reason or another, have been promptly and correctly delivered.

On this occasion, we had exited the apartment gate to run an errand and were driving along an outside road that runs parallel to our apartment complex when I noticed ahead an USPS van parked by the road side. When we approached the van, a man in USPS uniform came round the van and was waving at us. We recognized him immediately and pulled to a stop. Apparently, he thought a package that he would deliver later to our apartment in the usual manner was important and perhaps time-sensitive enough to warrant an “interception”. What a kind gesture, going beyond the call of duty. We thanked him profusely, while wondering whether the festive season has anything to do with this display of kindred spirit. But we soon realize that this is the basic human do-goodness at work. People will always respond in like manner if we choose to be decent human beings.

Back to the package. It contained various books that my D has collected in the past year and sent them our way so that we too could enjoy them. Each book has been marked clearly to whom it is directed, though further exchange is encouraged. Mine is a little magazine, Positive Thinking (Mar/Apr 2006 issue, see the cover to the right with its mantra: Attitude is Everything). And these are what I’ve managed to glean having gone half way through the magazine:

“You’re never too young to make a difference. It’s not the number of years of a life, but what someone does with them.” Arabella Uhry, 10 years old (p. 28)

“The path is only linear in the rearview mirror.” Brian McAllister, RoadTrip Nation (p. 28).

So regardless of whether you’re from the West or from the East, or whether the message is written in Chinese or English, certain things in life are just immutable.