Abraham Lincoln once met a man who he really didn’t like. The man kept
annoying him and Abe couldn’t understand what it was that made him have
to act like that all the time. In a famous quote, he said “I don’t like
that man. I must get to know him better.” This quote embodies one of the
great sentiments about people that we sometimes forget to incorporate
into our lives.
There are many people in the world who don’t make
sense to us and who we wish were different than the way they are. In
fact, there are many people that we would simply do better to just avoid
rather than try to understand them. Still, Abe Lincoln’s quote is a
great sentiment for many of us to learn by because it teaches us that we
don’t always see people for who they truly are and we may be too quick
to judge a person who has been through something that may have been
harder than we can imagine.
Everybody is born into a certain life
and is faced with overcoming the difficulties that are presented to
them. If we are faced with some people who are extremely hard to endure,
it may be that there is a lesson in there for us to learn about the
problems that others face in their lives. It may be that we can stretch
our minds and our hearts to incorporate compassion and understanding
into our relationships and make things better for ourselves and others.
Learning to look past some of the initial problems we see in others and
find that silver lining in their cloud is a great talent and an ability
that can define a leader. This was the kind of leadership that our 16th
president embodied and why he became such a great emancipator for so
many people.
Another great quote that expresses the essence of a
positive attitude is by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson once said “The sun
shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this
is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and
mosquitos and silly people.” Emerson’s words are a real wake up call for
many people. They may think to themselves, have they ever felt the need
to wake up every morning and see the first glimmer of light as it
begins to glow in the night sky? Have they noticed how fast the sky
begins to brighten up upon the first evidence of daylight? Have they
noticed how long it takes after that before the actual sun can be seen
on the horizon? Have they noticed the magnificence of those first sun
beams as they peak over the horizon and burn a bright fire against your
eye?
These things that can be witnessed each morning by everyone
on the planet are more than often ignored by millions of sleeping
people. This amazing and monumental event is seen as nothing because it
happens everyday and has been pushed into the background of our
subconscious mind. The sun indeed provides all life to the world and is
an amazing phenomenon too great to even imagine its intensity. Still,
somehow this is all lost to us against a long list of other problems and
concerns that plague us each day.
Keeping a positive attitude
each day is something that can only come through discipline and effort
at first. Once we have created a lot of bad habits and negative
attitudes, they take a concerted discipline to overcome. Once we
overcome them, however, we may begin to see great things in both the
people we thought we could never like and the magnificent sun that we
never noticed before.
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