By
Clare on
October 31, 2010
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
from J.K. Rowling’s 2008 Commencement Address at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association (via Amanda Horne)
By
Clare on
August 1, 2010
My personal test of a life well lived? To me, the answer lies in the quality of our personal relationships and the care we devote to them. Everything else is peripheral, and mostly trivial. Our personal relationships – the test bed of our sensitivity, our moral courage and our capacity for love – are not only the source of life’s richest meanings, but as we struggle to establish them, nurture them and sometimes forsake them, they teach us that notions like happiness or sadness are mere accidents of our fluctuating emotional state, and are incidental to the great realisation that it is in loving we are made whole.
Extract of a fabulous speech from Hugh Mackay at the Happiness & Its Causes 2010 Conference.
(via Zoe Lamont)
