Lifestyles

How do you live on a day by day basis? What choices to you make and what plans do you prepare for experiencing life in the way you want to?  The size of your home, the neighborhood in which you invest the time of your generation? Or maybe diet and the foods you prepare. Or the clothes you choose to wear?

The Life Is Art Foundation provides these words of wisdom for us:

“I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel.”

Perhaps you didn't think of these things in this manner? Certainly they do not define you but in many ways you give them definition because of the way you live. How intentional is your lifestyle? And what are the major defining elements?

There is an art in living; but there is living in art, too. Art is meaning, finesse of ideas, expression of all our senses – sound, vision, feel, smell, touch – and the feeling of those same senses.

We live in a multicultural social environment. We exist with a multiplex of rules and regulations and expectations as well. Often we do not know what we are to do. But we muddle along, don’t we?

John Trudell gives us this thought:

“I’m just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing its understanding of being human.”

I think this is just cause for our search for both meaning and art. It humanizes us, and in major part we humanize everything else if we push for meaning and expression of our inner selves.

DailyFeelGood on Facebook gives us permission to be human:

“Notice: you are hereby allowed to be happy, to love yourself, to realize your worth, to believe in great things, and to be treated with love and respect.”

In fact, if we live this way we will be better partners to others who matter to us, and we will soften the world for others to live in it.

The Bible commands that ‘we love others as we would have them love us.’ We can’t love others very well if we don’t love ourselves. Do we have to allow ourselves to do this? Intentionally? Maybe so. You and I deserve love and respect but only if we know how to love and respect ourselves first.

And finally, Anthony Douglas Williams reminds us of this kernel of truth:

            “Kindness is not an act. It is a lifestyle.”

And that is a big point to make. Simple. Direct. True.

May we incorporate it in our daily living always. We can only hope it will be returned in kind over and over again until our end time.

January 18, 2014