?What would you consider your philosophy for a good life?<br />
<br />
Faith, positive thinking, realistic expectations, clear conscience, perseverance.<br />
<br />
Faith is essential for a human being to process things that happen and are completely beyond individual understanding or control. It is defined as firm belief in facts not experienced<br />
<br />
Positive thinking is an attitude, to expect a positive outcome of an occurrence that is not yet in evidence.  I think it is mostly inherited or at least learned in early stages of development from parental examples.  I am sure it can be affected by chemical unbalances, but in my experience negative, pessimistic people usually come from similar parents.  It is important to be surrounded by optimistic, good-humored people most of the time, it helps us keep up the same attitude, while depressive, pessimistic people tend to erode our high spirits.<br />
<br />
Realistic expectations, being realistic helps us maintain balance.  Not to say that we should not aspire to high goals, to firmly believe they are attainable and hope to attain them, but to be also satisfied if our goals fall short.  Setting a goal that is beyond our physical capabilities is a recipe for disaster, unless we accept the outcome.  That, together with learning to work as a team in my opinion, is the goal of scholastic sports; too much emphasis is placed on winning, not enough in enjoyment of the activity and development of skills, appreciation of teammates, sportsmanship, realizing that the important thing is doing one?s best.<br />
<br />
Clear conscience means to me to act always in accordance with our current beliefs, being loyal to ourselves, albeit in the early years we are often mistaken; some people continue so in latter years.  Even with good intentions, we often fail to act as we should, but we Catholics have the privilege of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which if we have faith, lifts a great weight from our shoulders.<br />
<br />
Perseverance is essential to success, to achieving one?s goals.  Climate, politics, economics, and most other things are cycles, life invariably throws us curves along the way that are mostly out of our reach, how we react to them is not.  We must always accept tragedies and inconveniences, react to them with faith, without resentment.<br />
<br />
Communist leadership taught to recruits from its Comintern to seek people who are resentful, who believed the world had not treated them as they deserved, for recruitment, which they divided into three categories, Active, Useful Fools and Travel Companions. <br />
<br />
They new well that resentful people are fertile ground on which to plant the seed of envy, a foundation on which it is easy to build a communist mentality.<br />
<br />
It is something we must always watch against; it is easy to blame others without examining our own actions and what we could do differently to attain our goals.  <br />
<br />
<p><a href="./">Back</a></p>