[ Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Ellen-Marie Silverman
Date: 19 Oct 2008
Time: 19:21:57 -0500
Remote Name: 64.12.117.11
[[Your article was very postive and encouraging! As a student clinician, I wanted to know if you could offer some examples of what the rewards are for taking a journal unknown instead of sticking to the path of least resistance. All people love to hear success stories!]] Well, I think Robert Frost, the poet, said it well (I think I'm paraphrasing, but you'll get the message), "Two paths diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference." In our culture, walking a Path of Happiness with awareness, deliberation, effort, consistency, know-how, courage, and patience is like the path less traveled, and the one more likely to lead to discoveries of our true nature, builds our character, and bring us greater awareness of the world around us and our place in it. As our current financial crisis suggests, although it is global not particular to the USA, many of us were been tempted to focus on the short-term, our immediate satisfaction, rather than on what would bring us long-term, lasting happiness. When we conduct ourselves with a view toward the long haul by chosing mind-behavior sets we think will bring us lasting happiness, we are likely to experience it. When we direct our attention and effort to satisfying our present desires, even as we are successful, we find sooner or later the satisfaction we initially experience sooner or later evaporates leaving us feeling anxious, wondering what we need to do to be happy again, and we never really become happy, only more anxious searching for the next thing to gran hold onto that we think will remove our unhappiness and make us happy. Just as you, a graduate student have chosen to attend graduate school because you think, in the long run, having a graduate degree and the opportunity to enter a service profession will make you happy, you and those like you are more likely to experience a happy life than someone looking for a quick fix, a new car, a hot partner, glam clothes, etc. >>> Well, this nay not be the answer you wanted because you requested a success story fom me. I guess and hope that you will be able to write your own success story by continuing to make the kind of choices you apparently have already begun to make by chosing to go to college, choosing to go to graduate school, choosing to be a member of a service profession. The odds are in your favor. It has been said that "compassionate people are happy people" (H.H. the Dalai Lama). So, as someone intent on becoming a speech-language pathologist, a professional generally drivent to relate compassionately to others, you are a likely candidate to write your own uccessful life story. Best, Ellen-Marie Silverman