Why honesty?

This morning, I gave a presentation on honesty to new students at my school. It was such a difficult thing to present this topic. I personally feel that I haven’t been 100% honest in my life. It was hard, quite hard, both in preparation and delivery, but it’s gonna be much harder in the application. I realize that once I speak to the students about honesty they will watch me every day and I can’t imagine what they will think about me if they find me dishonest.

However, this task gives me an opportunity to look at myself. How honest am I? It’s the first question which came up when I prepared the presentation. I’m not a really good guy. I also live in a world of lies that can easily force me to be dishonest. I thought hard and I tried to find an answer whether I’m the right man to present this topic or not.

What went on afterwards was far beyond my presumption about myself. I found out that no matter how bad my past was, I had to give values to the life itself, more specifically to my students. I began to think about the future by thinking how I can contribute to this world.

Let’s begin now. We live in a very challenging world where many things are measured by what we have and what we don’t have. Frankly speaking, it’s all about wealthy, money, competition, etc. We forget that life is also about how to live it as it has to be and that we are all God’s creature who should create harmony in our life.

Harmony can be created by respecting each other and one of the ways to respect each other is by being honest. Honesty means being truthful in our thoughts, words, and actions. Being honest means choosing not to lie and cheat in any way although it’s not easy not to lie. We lie to avoid troubles, to look good to others, to hide behind failures, and also sometimes to avoid hurting somebody else’s heart.

Although, it’s very human and normal that sometimes we lie, we’d better try at our best to be honest. Honesty may hurt others, but it’s always better to tell the truth than to lie. Therefore, truth should be accompanied by affection and empathy. The nature of being honest is to create harmony in our life and harmony is always related to affection.

Let’s be honest for a better living. If it’s too difficult to be honest to others, start to be honest to ourselves first. We can never be honest to others without being truthful deep inside our heart. It’s not easy, but we can give it a try.  If we are honest, our character will always shine through. Listen to our heart and see what happens. God bless you all.

You Only Live Once

Yeahh, you only live once. We only live once. At least, that’s what we know about our present life. Though some people or some religions say that there’s a life after the life we live now but that’s, in my opinion, is unproven. So let’s just focus on our current life because it’s what we’re facing now.

I’m not going to teach you many things about life since many of you might have more experiences than what I have. I’m just about to share my thoughts about what I see in this wonderful world. Once again, honestly, I won’t teach you about life. I’m not that great to be a mentor of life.

All right, let’s start our discussion. Nowadays, life seems to be so stressful for some people. There are many causes of stress. Some of them are financial problems, being fired from job, job demands, the death of the one we love, an illness suffered by a member of the family, family problems, unhealthy social life, and many more.

Those causes can disrupt the harmony of our life both as an individual and as a member of the society. Then, how to get rid of our problems? It’s not an easy question to answer. As I know, there are some problems that we can solve and some problems that are very difficult to solve or, even worse, we can’t solve them because we don’t have control or power over them.

What can we do, then? The first thing to do is to act positively toward our problems. If we fail to control ourselves, then we’re likely to be stressed or, worse, depressed. Everybody can feel stressed. Nobody can avoid feeling stressed. I don’t believe that there’s somebody who never feels stressed. It’s impossible. We’re just common people, aren’t we?

However, in several cases, some people are unable to control their stress until physical symptoms force them to realize that they have to take serious actions. Sometimes, they leave their stress unchecked until it makes them ill. The solution might be to learn to recognize that they are stressed and to do something to minimize the stress and they should try to avoid additional stress. Knowing what is likely to cause stress can help us get rid of our stress.

Is that easy? Of course, not, but we must try every way to be aware of ourselves and to understand ourselves better. See ourselves deeper by having a reflection. Have we done everything properly? Or, did we make stupid mistakes that brought us to stress? Making some questions directed to ourselves and answering them personally might help us. We can also try at some points to put our burdens aside and to relax. Enjoying our life might be a good idea not to be stressed out. Make sure that we get enough fun out of life. If we can’t face the stress alone, seek support from others by sharing our problems might be helpful to minimize and to offload our stress.

Once again, we only live once. We must never let anything destroy our life. Keep calm and enjoy the ride. God bless you!

Let's be Happy

Who never feels sad, disappointed, or any other bad feelings? I guess nobody. Everybody must have ever felt those kinds of unpleasant feelings and it is pretty normal because we are just human beings who walk through our own paths that have different challenges and obstacles. It is impossible that we never get problems and difficulties in our life, impossible.

Nevertheless, should our problems destroy our life? The answer may vary. It may be “yes” when we are drowned in our problems without finding a way out or, even worse, we are trapped in our sadness so deeply that we do not have courage to get out of our problems. Or, it may be “no” when we keep on believing that a bad situation will end soon and we believe that there is still a hope to get back to the right track again.

The solution is actually in ourselves. Whether or not we will be happy depends on our attitude toward it. Do we see a problem as a part of our life or otherwise? Do we see a failures as the end of the world or otherwise? We actually have got the answer in ourselves.

The key is optimism. We should have a positive outlook to face everything in front of us. We must understand that life does not always turn out the way we plan. We have to see life as a journey that can be fun at a point and can be very difficult at another point. If we have the awareness that life is a learning process, it will be easy for us to feel happy whatever things might happen to us.

Life is full of choices and happiness is really a choice. We can choose to be happy or not. We can choose to accomplish our mission in this world nicely or not. Living our life is not easy but we can choose to enjoy it or to cry over it. If we choose to be happy in our life, start to think and act positively. Peaceful mind will lead us to better life. Don’t waste our time regretting what happened in the past but let’s begin to see the future happily. Be thankful for everything that we have got and enjoy every single step in our life will make us happier. Finally, let’s choose happiness as our mental state to face the world. Don’t worry, be happy. 

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. (Guillaume Apollinaire)