THY NEIGHBOR BE THY FRIEND

Have you ever read a newspaper or watched a story about something terrible that happened to someone that you don’t know and yet you feel somehow torn at what happened to a perfect stranger to the point where it may even bring your eyes to well up in tears? This is a very natural human response to our responsibility to all mankind. Imagine if living in your small neighborhood the only ones whose life you touch or whose life touched you were the people only that lived in your house, or on your block, or your co-worker, and/or your classmate. That would truly be a very small circle, but truly all are touched by what we do or what we say. Most things we do will have an effect on someone outside of our circle. If at work we produce a product does it not get distributed to many outside of our circle? If at school studying a particular field does that not effect change that we will be contributing outside of our circle to our field of study? If at home, do we not raise our children and teach them to respect others and go out of their circle? Do not all of these conditions affect our neighbor? Is our neighbor the person next door or across the ocean? Is Earth round and does it evolve around the sun or does it just stay put never changing always effecting the exact same outcomes day after day, year after year? No it does not stay put and it does effect change with its movements and so does mankind. All of us effect change to the world that we live in through our thoughts, actions and energy. So let’s all make our neighbor our friend. Be they next door or across the ocean, let’s make the world a better place and have thy neighbor be thy friend.

Evaluating Your Life

By Shereema Ibrahim, March 2009

 

There are many things one must take into consideration when evaluating your life. We could go on and on making a list of all of our experiences starting from childhood all the way to the present, but should we? One could propose to rack one’s brain on the timeline of events, but why give ourselves a headache? Maybe it would better to start at the present and just ask ourselves, “How do I feel?” Allow the raw emotions of letting one go without prejudice of any kind and just feel. For that moment in time you ask yourself, “Am I alive?” Yes maybe everything is not as you would have dreamed it to be, but yet here you are able to think, able to breathe and able even to question your life. So then you must ask yourself, “Why?” Maybe you are or have been married and maybe you haven’t; Maybe you have children or maybe you don’t; Maybe you’ve had a lot of hardships or maybe you haven’t; Maybe you are spiritual and maybe you’re not. But above all you have life and where there is life, there is HOPE.

HOPE is what we all have no matter what. The opportunity for a better tomorrow regardless how bleak it may seem at the time. When we acknowledge this single promise of life, we must SMILE and make ourselves feel good. Give ourselves the single liberty to LOVE foremost ourselves enough to know and TRUST in the HOPE. Then we will know the true value of our life. It’s just living it. 

LIFE & SECRETS

 Secrets....why do we choose to keep them and why almost always when we do someone inevitably gets hurt.  We must learn to know, and this is the tricky part, when not to tell, when to keep what we know a secret.  There is a certain wisdom that accomplishes this feat of which most of us do not have.  You have to have a true sense of "truth" and how it works in this world and then of course, the spiritual world. The absolute "truth" can very often me most painful, but the flip side could be with the knowledge and understanding of that "truth" an individual or many will go about their lives making choices based upon a lie, a "secret" that was kept because someone thought they were wise enough to know how YOU or OTHERS would do without such knowledge.  Unfortunately, they were wrong, terribly wrong making choices for you, taking away your FREE WILL...."SECRETS" almost always hurt when are finally told.  The discovery of things that could have helped us put things into their proper prospective and makes our survival levels higher and our spirits stronger.   But someone chose for you, their untalented wisdom to hold back from you your rights...The expression, "it takes a whole village to raise a child" means just that.  Your community of family and close friends should be your circle of trust....which means....TRUTH....NO SECRETS.  Maybe one day people will come to realize how detriment "secrets" are to everyone.  If we live with "truth" and "respect", we will realize that it is much wiser to give the choice and exercise "respect" for all by telling the "absolute truth".  Above all be true to yourself!

W.I.L.L.

W. I. L. L. 

The word will is a very powerful word. There are many definition meanings but one is "habitually disposed or inclined to" which leads one to ask disposed or inclined to what? For all of us, that answer would be different and possibly when one was asked, this would then be the determining factor. 

To say that we have enforced our "will" is claiming a sense of empowerment and determination of who we are or what our orientations represent.  Let no one give their will to another, be it human or something. Because so many of us equate "will" with what may be required or expected by us, we often transfer our wills unknowingly to another not our own. 

So many of us if we were to break down the acronym "W.I.L.L." exactly what the letters  represented to them, there would be almost as many words as individuals. Try for yourself to see how powerful this word really is being doing the exercise alone or with your friends. You will discover what is important to each. You might even learn something profound about yourself. Thereby doing so, exercising your will to determine how you can empower  yourself. 

Finding Your Way

By Shereema Ibrahim, 3/14/05

 

No matter what the age, we are constantly trying to find our way.  A young toddler looks all around and tries to figure out where he or she wants to go and why.  This thought is relatively simple unlike that of adults who want to get somewhere and take so many different paths trying to reach a given destination.

There are so many ways for us to travel to our various destinations throughout our lifetime, but only some are worth travelling.  Often a road will present itself, seemingly like the logical direction to go.  Then along the way we will find so many up-hills, mudslides, rivers with no bridges to cross and mountains with no safe way of climbing.  What do you do if you come to such a point?  Do you turn around and go back to the beginning or do you forge ahead on the course you chose even though you know it’s a mistake?

 

Sometimes the path we take starts straight and easy to travel, but then the terrain starts to change to a more difficult course.  It’s easy to say that we should just stop moving forward and retreat, but this is not always the best solution.  Staying on course and adjusting to the new terrain is probably the better way to go.  Throughout the course of life, we will have to adapt to the circumstances or environment we are in currently.  This does not mean changing who we are or where we want to go, only how we get there.

From the very beginning, we start foreseeing where we want to be.  The difficult thing is trying to get there.