On The High Seas, What Would Be Your Message Inside the Bottle?

cleateles (60)in #motivation • 6 years ago

Would that be an encouraging message? Or a discouraging message?

Every day we have the chance to throw our message in the bottle overboard. Understand the sea like the many people you meet every day.

Imagine that you are on the edge of a beach thinking about some difficult situation, without hope, without a word that can cheer you up, begging to someone to come and help you see that everything is going to be all right.

Imagine that on the other side of the sea is someone with the chance to make you feel better with a positive message and put it in a bottle. Do you have a sense of the good that will bring that person and the good that comes back to you when someone tells you that finding your "bottle" was one of the best things that could have happened?

"We should not allow anyone to leave our presence without feeling better or happier."

(Holy Mother Teresa of Calcutta)

And indeed, we should not. Because when it happens to us, we know well the horrible feeling of feeling much worse.

The idea of this post came from my comings and goings to work. (Long way is good because you have several lessons of what to do and what not to do.) Two women were sitting next to me. One of them reported that she was not feeling well, nothing cheered her, and she was languishing in sadness because she was not getting opportunities that would improve her life.

After hearing the woman's report, I expected her friend to cheer her up and get her off the bus with a more positive view that would help her cope with the difficulties. But unfortunately, the message on the friend listener's "bottle" was not very good ... it only made the poor woman worse off.

It's not that it's a must cheer people up when you're not even excited. It is a question of solicitude, of compassion, and of acknowledging that it could be you in the place of the other.

We have problems, we all have. But what does it cost to forget some of our problems to remember the other? What does it cost us to cheer up, drive away someone's negativity?

When we do this to the other, we are doing to ourselves as well. When we are helpful in improving the other, we are also working on our improvement.

May people leave our presence better and happier.