A Quote by Robert Kennedy, Jr.
A lot of life is about trying to turn bad experiences into something good. Usually if you work at it, you can figure out a way to do it. Even our worst misfortunes are gifts.
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We all faced painful ethical challenges before we even knew how to spell our names. There were tough choices. Tradeoffs. Confusing signals regarding how to live one's life. And here we are now, today, still struggling. Still trying to sort things out. Still trying to work our way through life effectively. About the only thing that has changed is the scope of the problem. There's more at stake now. And we're in a position, as grownups, to do a lot more-good or bad-for ourselves, our organization, our world. But we still must wrestle with our imperfect ethics.
It's a lot easier to figure out how to scale something that doesn't feel like it would scale than it is to figure out what is actually gonna work. You're much better off going after something that will work that doesn't scale, then trying to figure how to scale it up, than you are trying to figure it all out.
We spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out who's going to be a good NFL quarterback, and we do a very bad job of it. We don't really know. And we also spend a lot of time trying to figure out who will be a good teacher, and we're really bad at that too. We don't know if someone is going to be a good teacher when they start teaching. So what should we do in those situations in which predictions are useless?
The greatest lesson I've learned in life is "Who knows what's good or bad?" Things come along that you really want, and they turn out to be the worst thing in the world. And some of the worst tragedies that you can conceive turn out to be the best things, the exact medicine you need in that moment.
I write poetry to figure things out. It's what I use as a navigating tool in my life, so when there's something that I just can't understand, I have to "poem" my way through it. For that reason I write a lot about family, because my family confuses me and I'm always trying to figure them out. I write a lot about love, because love is continually confusing in all of its many glorious aspects.
The good thing about life is that you can research anywhere you are. I'm just constantly gathering little bits of information all the time. I'm always grabbing something out of the headlines, out of the news or reading a book about astronomy and just trying to figure out how to get my head around the facts but the bigger stress is trying to connect those facts to normal life situations and our relationship with God.
The biggest mistake we make is trying to square the way we feel about something today with the way we felt about it yesterday. You shouldn’t even bother doing it. You should just figure out the way you feel today and if it happens to comply with what you thought before, fine. If it contradicts it, whatever. Life goes on.
Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it's not merely benign or 'too bad' if we don't use the gifts that we've been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don't use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighted down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief.
So much of life is about attitude and how we handle what life throws our way. Life is good - even when a situation appears to be the worst.
Usually I'm trying to turn something around or turn it inside out and see what's underneath. I know that probably sounds incredibly vague but I never set out to be likeable or funny or anything like that. I'm just trying to tell the story in the best way that I can and serve the writer because it's really about the writer.
I'm trying to figure things out in the world. No one knows what this life thing is all about - there's no manual. Just trying to figure it out.
If you listen to the real in you, that part that's pulsing and has questions and is trying to figure something out, it will shape your life in a way where, when you get to be sixty, you'll succeed. You'll be happy about your life.
Turn off your email; turn off your phone; disconnect from the Internet; figure out a way to set limits so you can concentrate when you need to, and disengage when you need to. Technology is a good servant but a bad master.
I do love that discovery of when you're trying to figure out how to make something work, and it happens in a way that you didn't predict.
The meaning and the purpose behind some events are unknowable. This is the ultimate test of our faith. We must trust that everyone in life is here to learn different lessons at different times, that good and bad experiences are only the perceptions of man. After all, some of your worst experiences have truly been your best. They've sculpted you, trained you, developed within you a sensitivity and set you in a direction that reaches out to impact your ultimate destiny.
It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.
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