I sat quietly in the dark tonight. Have you ever just sat in darkness, closed your eyes and meditated thoughts of the day? Have you allowed thoughts of the day filter through your being - become mindful. Have you let life breathe into your soul? Tonight sitting here I had a realization that manifested itself in the form of a thought. Love life by living it and live life by loving it.
What exactly does loving one’s life mean? And how exactly does loving one’s life count as have having lived it and not any other way? This can be explained by understanding the two main pillars that comprise that thought ~ love life by living it and live life, by loving it. Let's look at each individually and seek to understand how beautifully they go hand in hand.
Love
Love begins with ourselves. For example, if I can’t love myself, I can’t love anyone else. When a person can’t love his own self the way he is, there’s no way he can love others the way they are. Loving one’s self is not about gazing into the mirror all day in self-admiration; that’s vanity. Loving the self is about knowing your good and bad; its about accepting your flaws and working hard to overcome them and strive to become a better person; its about being steadfast and adhering to the values you have, no matter what. From this self acceptance comes love and from this love grows a strong sense of self-esteem, in which rests the seed of confidence. And confidence can do wonder's to a person’s life.
Life
Life in its purest and most basic sense is signified by the mechanism of the beating heart. As the heart beats, the person lives in the physical form of reality, but there’s much more to life than just the beating heart. For me, I can say that I fully live life if I can say yes to the following questions:
Are my days filled by doing things that I am most passionate about?
Have I made some positive contribution to the betterment of even ONE life in any way?
Have I made whole-hearted efforts to become a better person?
If the answer to all these questions is in the affirmative, it signifies that I have truly lived life.
So I love myself and I am living in the true sense. Is that all there is to it? Well, absolutely! It's that simple! They go together and become one, YOU!
If I have lived every moment of my life by filling each day with love ~ for self and others, passion (towards what I like doing the most) empathy (self-explanatory), and many other such positive virtues, I have truly loved this life. And when I love my life, only then am I living it!!!
