Celebrities Meaningful Quotes

When someone shares their hopes and dreams with us, we are witnessing deep courage and vulnerability. Celebrating their successes is easy, but when disappointment happens, it’s an incredible opportunity for meaningful connection.

When we allow ourselves to celebrate tiny victories as important and meaningful, we start to understand the incremental nature of change—how one vote can help change our democracy; how raising a child who is whole and loved can help change a nation; how educating one girl can change a whole village for the better.

We are still on our journey, still suffering and still laughing together. But I feel like the tide has turned, and I think we will have our happy ending yet. Even if it doesn’t look like what we were expecting.

On Global Holistic Wealth Day, let's celebrate a life well-lived, rich in purpose, wellness, and meaningful relationships – the true essence of holistic wealth.

We are born once and we celebrate our birthday every year till our death but to be celebrated every year after our death makes our birth meaningful

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

The kaleidoscope of experiences you have had this year are deeply meaningful and have enhanced your perspective on what actually matters. You have seen firsthand how fleeting and fragile life is and it has changed your DNA. Your tolerance for bullshit is lessening and although you are not always graceful with how you fight back, I love that you are a scrappy little lady. You are bored with the value system you see celebrated around you. Compromise is sometimes just manipulation and you are learning to identify that. You see a need for more people, women especially, to push back against the system that is in place and you've decided to do more of that. This experience will only turn up the volume on your voice the next time around. Hell yes to this and go go go.

...The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous "bubble letters" of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world - simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before - thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in a prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion.

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.

I don’t find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life—we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.

The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin’s era, had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems. Revived today in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes.

Now, over the years I've been forced to conclude that most celebrations don't work. The more carefully planned a signal occasion, the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Christmases, birthdays, award ceremonies, and weddings are swallowed by planning and preparation on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened.

You can establish a treasured family culture by celebrating the smallest occasions in big ways. All you have to do is identify what your children love, and repeat it. A tradition doesn’t have to be significant in order to be meaningful. It’s important because your family says it is.

If it makes you feel any better Tory, they were just as bad when Mia was born. At least you don’t have Sin, Kish, and Damien running around, trying to boil water for no other reason than that’s what someone had told Sin husbands are supposed to do and since Sin doesn’t know how to boil water, he had to micromanage the other two incompetents who’d never done it either. I’m amazed they didn’t band together to kill him during it or burn down the casino. And don’t get me started on my mother trying to murder my husband in the middle of it or her fighting with grandma over whose labors were more painful. Or, (she cast a meaningful glance to Simi,) someone setting my mother’s hair on fire and trying to barbecue her to celebrate the birth.” – Kat “That an old Charonte custom that go back forever ’cause we a really old race of demons who go back even before forever. When a new baby is born you kill off an old annoying family member who gets on everyone’s nerves which for all of us would be the heifer-goddess ’cause the only person who like her be you, Akra-Kat. I know she you mother and all, but sometimes you just gotta say no thank you. You a mean old heifer-goddess who need to go play in tragic and get run over by something big like a steamroller or bus or something else really painful that would hurt her a lot and make the rest of us laugh. Not to mention the Simi barbecue would have been fun too if someone, Akra-Kat, hadn’t stopped the Simi from it. I personally think it would have been a most magnificent gift for the baby. Barbecued heifer-goddess Artemis. Yum! No better meal. Oh then again baby got a delicate constitution and that might give the poor thing indigestion. Artemis definitely give the Simi indigestion and I ain’t even ate her yet.” – Simi

Gender is important, gender is complicated and gender is meaningful. Know your child and celebrate the kind of girl or boy your child is becoming.

Celebrate the meaningful life every second!

Everyone is a freedom fighter during their teenage and everyone is a ruler during their parenthood. Celebration of Independence day is meaningful!

Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death epitomizes a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death-avoidant culture. His strength was defined by ambition and effort, but also by softness, the opposite of bitterness. He spent much of his life wrestling with the question of how to live a meaningful life, and his book explores that essential territory. “Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson wrote. “Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.” Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer, to teach us to face death with integrity.

Your goals don’t need to be of the “become so rich I get to hang out with celebrities” variety. Nor do they need an approval stamp from anyone who’s not directly involved. What they do need to be is personally meaningful for you.

I have believed in the value of knowledge and of truth. And I have believed that the quality of a life is not measured by money, celebrity, or material goods but by richness of mind, generosity of spirit, and by meaningful human relationships.

There is a good reason that liberals focus extra attention on minorities, since they are the most likely to be disenfranchised. But in a democracy the only way to meaningfully defend them—and not just make empty gestures of recognition and “celebration”—is to win elections and exercise power in the long run, at every level of government. And the only way to accomplish that is to have a message that appeals to as many people as possible and pulls them together. Identity liberalism does just the opposite.

But that means that every human you know—and everyone you don’t—is insignificant, too. You are just as important as the celebrities and politicians and influencers who keep your world moving, which is to say “not very.” No decision you ever make will have a significant impact on the universe. Isn’t that so freeing, to know that your actions don’t matter? Maybe they matter to you and your fellow humans, but I guarantee that even on your small scales, most of your choices aren’t as meaningful as you fear they are.

Intuitive witchcraft is a spiritual lifestyle that celebrates the truth of who we are and what we feel. It’s all about creating a meaningful spirituality that honors our unique souls. We work with different energies—our own, that of the material world, and that of the immaterial worlds. With that wisdom, we draw from deep within and cast our will and purpose out into the world.

Libraries are packed with biographies of movie stars and politicians, most of them not capable of as much meaningful self-analysis as you’d get from a toad. We don’t need to know more about celebrities’ lives, Obadiah. What might help us, what might even save us, is knowing more about the lives of real people who’ve never made it even medium but who know where they came from and why.

Finally, and most important, I told those gathered in the church that Walter had taught me that mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion. Walter genuinely forgave the people who unfairly accused him, the people who convicted him, and the people who judged him unworthy of mercy. And in the end, it was just mercy toward others that allowed him to recover a life worth celebrating, a life that rediscovered the love and freedom that all humans desire, a life that overcame death and condemnation until it was time to die on God’s schedule.

Ultimately what I’m talking about is living with controlled disorder, not trying to get rid of it or waiting to get over it. It is not done in a day, and it is not done with medication alone (although it is usually not done without it). You need to ask yourself, “How can I make my life work? How can I make my relationships work? How can I make my career meaningful?” If it means doing things a bit differently than other people, then be different; it takes courage to break through the barriers of shame and guilt to ask for support. If it means breaking the mold, then break it; it takes courage to accept that you can’t do what other people can do. If it means challenging the “way it’s always been,” then challenge it; it takes courage to celebrate that you can often do what other people can’t.

Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty. They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore. But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted. In effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We spend so much time watching things—movies, computer screens, sports—but with gratitude we become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.

Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments or efforts. Hubris is an inflated sense of one’s own innate abilities that is tied more to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments. Humility is openness to new learning combined with a balanced and accurate assessment of our contributions, including our strengths, imperfections, and opportunities for growth. We really get this wrong.

No one talks about life, no one cares anymore, or maybe they never did to begin with. People just go about their business like it doesn't matter, and I think maybe they sometimes talk or think about meaningful things, hell maybe even everyone does, but you'll never hear about it from them. Maybe they don't even know it themselves, everyone just wants to talk about stupid bullshit that doesn't matter, like celebrities or the past.

In Japanese culture there is an art of fixing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer. The lacquer highlights the pottery’s flaw as a celebrated part of its history. Because the piece has been salvaged and repaired, pulled back from the edge of destruction, it is considered even more beautiful for having been broken. We’d been broken. And then we’d been pieced back together. The turmoil had been meaningful because now there was gold where the cracks used to be.

instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I drifted into thought. Among other thoughts, I recall these. You are getting on in years, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything and without actually undertaking anything. On the other hand, wherever you look in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of celebrities, the prized and highly acclaimed people, prominent or much discussed, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit humankind by making life easier and easier, some by railroads, others by omnibuses and steamships, others by telegraph, others by easily understood surveys and brief publications about everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who by virtue of thought systematically make spiritual existence easier and easier and yet more and more meaningful—and what are you doing?… So only one lack remains [in our time], even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty. Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehended that it was my task: to make difficulties everywhere. -Søren Kierkegaard

The invitation for each of us is to dive into the mystery of our questions and our wondering, and come out of the trance of certainty, the idea that we’re supposed to “know” what to do with this life or have some absolute conclusion or resolution about the many paradoxes and contradictions of our existence. Invite you to soften into your doubts, celebrate your uncertainty, and come to see the beauty - and ultimate safety - in Not Knowing. We know not where the journey leads, nor whether a final destination is even a meaningful concept. The attraction is the inherent thrill of participating in a grand creative endeavor for which participation is its own reward.

win. I thought the bureaucrats who had overseen the Emergency Rental Assistance program deserved a parade. They had to settle for scattered applause. When the ERA program was sputtering in the unsteady early days, it seemed that everyone was writing and tweeting about it. Later, when the rollout was working, it was ignored. Because journalists and pundits and social influencers did not celebrate the program, ERA garnered few champions in Washington. Elected leaders learned that they could direct serious federal resources to fighting evictions, make a real dent in the problem, and reap little credit for it. So, the Emergency Rental Assistance program became a temporary program, and we returned to normal, to a society where seven eviction filings are issued every minute.[31] Imagine if we had met the results of the ERA program with loud cheers. Imagine if we had taken to social media and gushed over what a difference it had made. Imagine if newspapers had run headlines that read, “Biden Administration Passes Most Important Eviction Prevention Measure in American History.” Imagine if we’d worked together to ensure that the low eviction regime established during the pandemic became the new normal. But we chose to shrug instead. Poor renters in the future will pay for this, as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a “messaging problem” when perhaps the matter is that liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair. Meaningful, tangible change had arrived, and we couldn’t see it. When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does.

The Proposal The diamond industry has pulled a fast one over on us. It has convinced us that there is no way to make public a lifetime commitment to another person without a very large, sparkly rock on a very slim band. This is, of course, nonsense. Often wedding books have engagement chapters that read like diamond-buying guides. But the truth is, the way to get engaged is for the two of you to decide that you want to get married. So the next time someone tries to imply that you are not engaged because you don’t have a dramatic enough engagement story or a ring, firmly say, “You know, I like to think of my partner as my rock,” and slowly raise your eyebrow. The modern wedding industry—along with a fair share of romantic comedies—has set a pretty high bar for proposals. We think they need to be elaborate and surprising. But they don’t. A proposal should be: • A decision to get married • Romantic (because you decide to spend the rest of your lives together, not necessarily because of its elaborate nature) • Possibly mutual • Possibly discussed in advance • Possibly instigated by you • Not used to judge the state of your relationship • An event that may be followed by the not-at-all-romantic kind of sobbing, because you realize your life is changing forever It’s exciting to decide to get married. And scary. But the moment of proposal is just that: a moment. It moves you to the next step of the process; it’s not the be-all, end-all. So maybe you have a fancy candlelight dinner followed by parachutists delivering you a pear-shaped, seven-carat diamond. Or maybe you decide to get married one Sunday morning over the newspaper and a cup of coffee. Either way is fine. The point is that you decided to spend your life with someone you love.

Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable. Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow. And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness. The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.

From the earliest years we have been conditioned to believe that a benign fate would provide for us. After all, everybody seemed to agree that we had the great fortune of living in the richest country that ever was, in the most scientifically advanced period of human history, surrounded by the most efficient technology, protected by the wisest Constitution. Therefore, it made sense to expect that we would have a richer, more meaningful life than any earlier members of the human race. If our grandparents, living in that ridiculously primitive past, could be content, just imagine how happy we would be! Scientists told us this was so, it was preached from the pulpits of churches, and it was confirmed by thousands of TV commercials celebrating the good life. Yet despite all these assurances, sooner or later we wake up alone, sensing that there is no way this affluent, scientific, and sophisticated world is going to provide us with happiness.

So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I drifted into thought. Among other thoughts, I recall these. You are getting on in years, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything and without actually undertaking anything. On the other hand, wherever you look in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of celebrities, the prized and highly acclaimed people, prominent or much discussed, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit humankind by making life easier and easier, some by railroads, others by omnibuses and steamships, others by telegraph, others by easily understood surveys and brief publications about everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who by virtue of thought systematically make spiritual existence easier and easier and yet more and more meaningful—and what are you doing? … So only one lack remains [in our time], even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty. Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehended that it was my task: to make difficulties everywhere.

The analogy that has helped me most is this: in Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat-owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile; therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, though that’s often what people say about more abstract issues in which, nevertheless, lives, places, cultures, species, rights are at stake. They went out there in fishing boats and rowboats and pirogues and all kinds of small craft, some driving from as far as Texas and eluding the authorities to get in, others refugees themselves working within the city. There was bumper-to-bumper boat-trailer traffic—the celebrated Cajun Navy—going toward the city the day after the levees broke. None of those people said, I can’t rescue them all. All of them said, I can rescue someone, and that’s work so meaningful and important I will risk my life and defy the authorities to do it. And they did. Of course, working for systemic change also matters—the kind of change that might prevent calamities by addressing the climate or the infrastructure or the environmental and economic injustice that put some people in harm’s way in New Orleans in the first place.

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before. Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.

The village square teemed with life, swirling with vibrant colors and boisterous chatter. The entire village had gathered, celebrating the return of their ancestral spirit. Laughter and music filled the air, carrying with it an energy that made Kitsune smile. Paper lanterns of all colors floated lazily above, their delicate glow reflecting on the smiling faces below. Cherry blossoms caught in the playful breeze, their sweet, earthy scent settling over the scene. At the center, villagers danced with unbridled joy, the rhythm of the taiko drums and the melody of flutes guiding their steps. To the side, a large table groaned under the weight of a feast. Sticky rice balls, steamed dumplings, seaweed soup, sushi, and more filled the air with a mouthwatering aroma. As she approached the table, she was greeted warmly by the villagers, who offered her food, their smiles genuine and welcoming. She filled a plate and sat at a table with Goro and Sota, overlooking the celebration. The event brought back a flood of memories of a similar celebration from her childhood—a time when everything was much simpler and she could easily answer the question who are you? The memory filled her heart with a sweet sadness, a reminder of what she lost and what had carved the road to where she was now. Her gaze fell on the dancing villagers, but she wasn’t watching them. Not really. Her attention was fully embedded in her heart ache, longing for the past, for the life that was so cruelly ripped away from her. “I think... I think I might know how to answer your question,” she finally said, her voice soft and steady, barely audible over the cacophony of festivity around them. “Oh?” Goro responded, his face alight with intrigue. “I would have to tell you my story.” Kitsune’s eyes reflected the somber clouds of her past. Goro swallowed his bite of food before nodding. “Let us retire to the dojo, and you can tell me.” They retreated from the bustling square, leaving behind the chaos of the celebration. The sounds of laughter and chatter and drums carried away by distance. The dojo, with its bamboo and sturdy jungle planks, was bathed in the soft luminescence of the moonlight, the surface of its wooden architecture glistening faintly under the glow. They stepped into the silent tranquility of the building, and Kitsune made her way to the center, the smooth, cool touch of the polished wooden floor beneath her providing a sense of peace. Assuming the lotus position, she calmed herself, ready to speak of memories she hadn’t confronted in a long time. Not in any meaningful way at least. Across from her, Goro settled, his gaze intense yet patient, encouraging her with a gentle smile like he somehow already understood her story was hard to verbalize.

My first night with Beck, she told me, 'I had many times in my life where I could have either chased despair or been weird. I chose weird.' Beck says that a third of people who sign up for life-coach training don't know what they want from it. They are looking for something different. Something weird. This is where Beck comes in with her shaman friends and her psychic ponies. Her coaching is designed to give women permission to be weird, because who knows? Beck believes that weirdness, or being open to weirdness, is the key to a more meaningful existence. Dorothy Dix advised women on how to disguise their weirdness; she believed there was always a way, even without a husband, for a woman to contribute to society. Dear Abby and Ann Landers were dogged in their insistence that were only a select number of ways to live. Beck continues in the tradition of Mildred Newman, training her followers to ignore the judgements of others and their own self-doubt. But Newman was concerned only with the health and satisfaction of her patients and readers, wheres Beck thinks all this self-care leads to something awesome, in the most literal sense of the word, that it generates miracles and time travel and a new world order. She senses, perhaps, that this is what her readers need to hear. Newman's followers, especially the celebrity set, were focused on and delighted by their own achievements, but Beck's followers are more self-conscious and coy. Their self-care needs to be justified.

Dear Readers, Valentine's Day! And to those who are single, I'd like to say something. Society has misconstrued romantic love and has certainly misunderstood love in general. What we believe to be romantic love is actually attachment, lust, and fear (of loss). Society preaches passion as a function of romantic love, and passion CAN be a function of love, but it functions where one demonstrates heroism, selflessness and sacrifice to benefit the life of another. It has nothing to do with touch nor sexual desire. Love is everything. Life teeters on the spectrum of love and fear. Love is multidimensional, beyond the experience of mere emotion. Love is a hand extended to the shoulder of a distressed stranger, the smile of a child, it's the gratitude towards something beyond ourselves when circumstance benefits us. Anybody who has told you that you need another being to supplement your experience of love has misguided you. To live meaningfully is to celebrate love everyday.

Society has misconstrued romantic love and has certainly misunderstood love in general. What we believe to be romantic love is actually attachment, lust, and fear (of loss). Society preaches passion as a function of romantic love, and passion CAN be a function of love, but it functions where one demonstrates heroism, selflessness and sacrifice to benefit the life of another. It has nothing to do with touch nor sexual desire. Love is everything. Life teeters on the spectrum of love and fear. Love is multidimensional, beyond the experience of mere emotion. Love is a hand extended to the shoulder of a distressed stranger, the smile of a child, it's the gratitude towards something beyond ourselves when circumstance benefits us. Anybody who has told you that you need another being to supplement your experience of love has misguided you. To live meaningfully is to celebrate love everyday.

One of the biggest misconceptions I had growing up in the church was that I had to have a certain personality to truly shine and contribute something meaningful. It seemed the boisterous, extroverted, gregarious girls were the ones who were celebrated, and there was somehow something wrong with me since I didn’t want to be the center of attention. My more reserved and artistic personality, talents, and gifts seemed more hidden and less important, so I was easily compliant, merging with others dreams and plans in an effort to avoid conflict and struggle. All the while, desires burned within me: to point others to beauty, to gather people together in a meaningful way, to have a life infused with bravery and adventure, to appreciate the body God has given me imperfect as it is. A song has been deep inside all along waiting to be sung.

When we celebrate holidays and bigger events with our children, it reminds them that they are part of something bigger. As we celebrate traditions passed down form generation to generation, we connect our children to their heritage. Celebrating also gives us many opportunities to see how Gods is faithful. We can pint them back to the many ways God has come through

Celebrating helps your children to have a place to belong, and it bonds the family in a special way. As your children move out and start families of their own, they will remember all the ways you celebrated when they were small

gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We

We followed him to a covered veranda. In America, we would call that a lemonade porch, however, in South Africa, they call it a stoep. A meeting place located outside the front of the home where friends and family can gather, and one can watch the rising or the setting of the sun in the cozy spot simply called a stoep. The stoep projected a natural ambience of peace and harmony, as a light breeze filled the space with its woodsy fragrance of pine and other natural fragrances inspired by the area’s shrubbery. It almost felt like it was hypnotizing one into a deeper state of tranquility, a state of existence that celebrated the quiet pockets of solitude where a richer from of living is housed. It made one slouch a little more meaningfully and relax the muscles of your body a little more conscientiously, as you let go of one’s innate need to think – to think to the point of hyper focusing on the meaningless details of life, for example, the incessant need to make every moment in life count… Yet, the stoep’s lesson of deeper living is simply the gift of becoming reacquainted with the joy of just being – open yet connected to now, without a higher purpose beyond that. Sometimes, the greatest gift that we can give ourselves is just to sit in the rawness of the moment without any outcome or intention in mind – except, to breathe in the life of the area around us. That is where my afternoon’s lesson ended, knowing that a stoep is a space where quality of human connection is made with or without the presence of any audience because it’s that space that celebrates the stillness of nothing and yet everything simultaneously, or in the words of Rumi: “In order to understand the dance, one must be still. And in order to truly understand the stillness, one must dance.” In South Africa that concept is lovingly called…Die Stoep, a space of possibility.

After Arvid had learned in fall 2018 the cancer had returned, he devoted two months crafting letters to each of his children that he instructed be read on their twenty-first, twenty-eighth, thirty-fifth, and forty-fifth birthdays. He chose each year because those years were significant in his own life: official adulthood, the age he got married, the age he became vice principal, and the age he learned the cancer had returned. The letters were personalized to each Shastri-Persson for each milestone. The twenty-first-birthday letter was an assortment of memories and anecdotes about each child; the twenty-eighth letter was advice on love, friendships, and relationships; the thirty-fifth letter was Arvid's thoughts on the importance of kindness and generosity, on both a grand scale and small; and the forty-fifth was simply a list of songs Arvid asked that they listen to on their birthdays at a location of great significance to them. He signed off with the same sentence in all four letters: "Celebrate each remaining birthday in a way that is meaningful to you. Each one is precious and extraordinary, and so you are to me. I love you, and I am with you always. Take care of each other. Love, Dad.

Love is this insane cycle of one person breaking to make somebody else whole. Eventually your time comes to give away a really valuable, meaningful piece of yourself. If you surrender yourself to love, there are always going to be times when you're the one being made whole and also times when you're the one breaking. And that's the win. Breaking and being made whole in the name of love is always a win.

Why is Valentine’s Day so important to you?” Sylred asks. “Because. It’s the one time of year where people actually seem to try. The dates. The thinking-of-you gifts. The flirting. The love. The sex. It’s beautiful to see everyone taking a day to celebrate love. It’s what we should do every day. Imagine what life would be like if everyone took the time to adore our loved ones—to express that love in whatever way is meaningful to them. As a cupid, that’s the dream. That love would be cherished, always. So that’s why Valentine’s Day is important, okay? It reminds us to take a moment and appreciate our loved ones.

All rituals are grounded in repetition and rigidly fixed action sequences.17 But they differ from habits in one important way. Rituals lack a direct, immediate reward. Instead, we have to invent a meaning and impose it on them. We lift our glasses to toast, blow out candles on a birthday cake, and wear caps and gowns at graduation. The act of standing silently for a song, singing while candles burn, or wearing a ceremonial costume acts as feedback, reinforcing our belief that something meaningful is taking place—an act of respect for our country, a celebration of another year, or an educational accomplishment.

Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness.” “We become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.” The phrase “adapting to goodness” reminds me of a quote I’ve seen all over social media: “Remember the day you prayed for the things you have now.” I normally scroll right past the heavy inspirational quotes, but this one got my attention. I think adapting to goodness without feeling gratitude is a function of scarcity. We either want things for the wrong reasons, then feel disappointed when we acquire them, or we just can’t accumulate enough to feel whole, so we accumulate and adapt, never valuing or appreciating.

that good friends aren’t afraid of your light. They never blow out your flame and you don’t blow out theirs—even when it’s really bright and it makes you worry about your own flame. When something good happens to you, they celebrate your flame. When something good happens to them, you celebrate their flame.

Enroll in the Best Hebrew School Atlanta for a Rich Cultural Experience Welcome to Hebrew School Atlanta, where they give a transforming educational path that celebrates Jewish heritage while also providing a rich cultural experience. Their school is committed to instilling a love of the Hebrew language, Jewish traditions, and values in each student while also encouraging individual growth and development. They think that education is about more than just learning; it is about developing a meaningful connection to one's heritage and community. They try to establish an inclusive and supportive environment in which students can explore their Jewish identity, develop a strong sense of belonging, and form lifelong connections. Their school is more than simply a place to learn; it's a thriving community that welcomes families from all walks of life. They encourage family involvement and provide opportunities for families to participate in their children's educational path. They think that fostering a compassionate and supportive atmosphere that promotes holistic growth requires a strong relationship between parents, educators, and students. Enrolling your child in the top Hebrew School in Atlanta means laying the groundwork for a lifetime of Jewish involvement, cultural awareness, and personal development. Join us on this extraordinary trip as we arouse curiosity, create a love of Hebrew, and foster a deep appreciation for Jewish School education. Let us work together to produce a wonderful cultural experience. Contact the head of the department at The Epstein School.

good friends aren’t afraid of your light. They never blow out your flame and you don’t blow out theirs—even when it’s really bright and it makes you worry about your own flame. When something good happens to you, they celebrate your flame. When something good happens to them, you celebrate their flame. To illustrate, we’d have our kids hold their hands out, palms flat and open, and say, “If this is your flame and the wind picks up, good friends cup their hands around your flame to prevent it from going out. And you do the same for them.

The rituals you create in your lives together are important and will keep you connected. One of the rituals we hope you’ll create is, of course, a date night every week. You can also create mini-rituals for when you part from each other and return to each other—like the 6-second kiss. Think about ways you can celebrate the triumphs in life both minor and major. What will be special for the two of you? Think about community rituals with friends and rituals for birthdays and other celebrations. There is almost no end to the ways in which you can create shared meaning to connect a couple. Be creative and be authentic to what is most meaningful for each other. Sharing about your day can be a ritual for connection. Gently try to uncover what is stressing the other person out, or making them fearful. Creating a safe space to share your interior world with each other is a ritual for connection. Every moment you’re together, and even when you’re not, you have an opportunity to honour all that is sacred in your relationship—however you define it.

Someone else was there with the ideas first, but the people we celebrate and want to emulate had an inkling about how to breathe new life into those products by making them meaningful to those who would use them. It’s possible to become that kind of person intentionally. In my work as a business adviser, I help entrepreneurs and business leaders to deconstruct what makes ideas fly. Together we seek a deeper understanding about the context in which those ideas will be embraced by and become meaningful to their clients, customers or users. This is how I enable my clients to discover the untapped potential of their innovations, ideas or stories. When it comes to making ideas take off, often the hope is that marketing will help people to understand why they need the product or service and thus make them want it. The truth is, the best marketing in the world can’t save an idea that hasn’t been developed with an understanding of who it’s for and why it will matter to those people.

The therapist asked me if I had shared my expectations with Steve or explained to him how we did it in our family, and asked him to celebrate with me that way because it meant a lot to me. I rolled my eyes and said, "look, if I have to ask, it's not worth it." She tilted her head and said, "if you're not asking for what's important to you, maybe it's because you think you're not worth it.

The cumulative, profound loss that we have collectively experienced would cause any sentient being to become depressed, anxious, and isolated. Yet, instead of rejecting this paradigm to make time for the things that connect us to each other and fill our lives with significance, inertia often wins. It is simply too easy to opt for handy, addictive, second-rate experiences that leave us feeling hollow and hopeless. We are like children with a comforting, nourishing meal within our grasp, yet we gorge ourselves on the candy pile dumped directly in front of us, even as our souls feel increasing nausea with each bite. The saccharine stupor disorients us, so we can no longer even intuit what we need. We just know we feel adrift, with a voracious hunger for something that we cannot name.

Happiness is not something that you feel when good things happen in your life. It is not something you feel when people say good things about you. It is not something you feel when you win an award. It is a state of living – present in grief or celebration, success or failure, stress or relaxation, suffering or pleasure.

Social networks like Facebook seem impelled by a similar aspiration. Through the statistical "discovery" of potential friends, the provision of "Like" buttons and other clickable tokens of affection, and the automated management of many of the time-consuming aspects of personal relations, they seek to streamline the messy process of affiliation. Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates all of this as "frictionless sharing"--the removal of conscious effort from socializing. But there's something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren't forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data. People aren't notes on a network grid. The bonds require trust and courtesy and sacrifice, all of which, at least to a technocrat's mind, are sources of inefficiency and inconvenience. Removing the friction from social attachments doesn't strengthen them; it weakens them. It makes them more like the attachments between consumers and products--easily formed and just as easily broken. Like meddlesome parents who never let their kids do anything on their own, Google, Facebook, and other makers of personal software end up demeaning and diminishing qualities of character that, at least in the past, have been seen as essential to a full and vigorous life: ingenuity, curiosity, independence, perseverance, daring. It may be that in the future we'll only experience such virtues vicariously, though the exploits of action figures like John Marston in the fantasy worlds we enter through screens.

Despite compelling new knowledge about learning, how the brain works, and what constitutes effective classroom groupings, classrooms have changed little over the past 100 years. We still assume that children of a given age are enough like each other that they can and should traverse the same curriculum in the same fashion. Further, schools act as though all children should finish classroom tasks as near to the same moment as possible, and that school year should be the same length for all learners. To this end, teachers generally assess student content mastery via tests based on specific chapters of the adopted textbook and summative tests at the end of designated marking periods. Teachers use the same grading system for all children of a given age and grade, whatever their starting point at the beginning of the year, with grades providing little if any indication of whether individual students have grown since the previous grading period or the degree to which students' attitudes and habits of mind contributed to their success or stagnation. Toward the end of the school year, schools administer standardized tests on the premise that all students of a certain age should have reached an average level of performance on the prescribed content by the testing date. Teachers, students, and schools that achieve the desired level of performance are celebrated; those that do not perform as desired are reprimanded, without any regard to the backgrounds, opportunities, and support systems available to any of the parties. Curriculum often has been based on goals that require students to accumulate and retain a variety of facts or to practice skills that are far removed from any meaningful context. Drill-and-practice worksheets are still a prime educational technology, a legacy of behaviorism rooted firmly in the 1930s. Teachers still largely run "tight ship" classes and are likely to work harder and more actively than their students much of the time.

You should do anything you can to strengthen your marriage and celebrate it. Milestones help you appreciate what you have. I think it’s too easy to forget how much you love someone if you don’t celebrate once in a while. If nothing else, those special occasions give you a chance to focus on the other person and spend some meaningful time with them.

You can’t separate how you approach life as a family and how your child will approach life as a thinker and learner. Your home is your child’s first workplace, first studio, first school — and your family members are your child’s first friends, first coworkers, first audience, first collaborators. You are his first mentor, and his siblings are his first teammates. You can’t separate learning from living. If your daily habits and routines don’t support your learning goals, you need to get them back into alignment. You want to build a family culture that celebrates and supports meaningful work. This is much more than saying the right thing — this is creating a lifestyle, a set of articulated beliefs, and a daily routine that encourage and sustain the life you want for your family. Building a family culture means being purposeful with your choices. What you say you value pales in importance next to the way you live from day to day, the choices you make, big and small.

The word ‘character’, however, has a fatally old-fashioned ring. The age of entitlement does not seek character, which demands obligation, but identity, which demands rights. Identity can be sought in money, status or celebrity but is most easily conferred by belonging to a group – usually based on ethnicity, race, religion or sexual orientation. The group will be especially attractive if it can claim to have suffered injustice. Then its members can be victims and enjoy the luxury of having someone else to blame. And blame is the new solution to the contemporary inability to accept random bad luck. Once misfortune was explained as the mysterious ways of God – the suffering had a purpose, which would be revealed in the fullness of time. Now, what makes misfortune meaningful is culpability. Someone must be to blame and it is never the victim.

A person au fait with the millenarian edict of knowing oneself does not need a tattoo, pierced ear, or gaudy neck chains to declare who they are. Eccentricity for its own sake is simply a boring fashion statement and not a thoughtful statement of what comprises a wholesome self. A self-poised person does not need to own a luxury car to determine their degree of self-worth. Nor does a self-determined person need to idolize celebrities, hate other people whom they do not wish to exemplify, or live vicariously through other people’s admirable deeds. A person with unique and contented self-identify does not flip through fashion magazines or scan the headlines of gossip magazines when loitering in the supermarket checkout stand. A person who contemplates the meaningfulness of their existence is not fixated with posing in other people’s raiment or observing other people’s nakedness. A person who knows who they are and realizes how to accomplish all of their life goals does not dally by people watching or become distracted by envying other people.

You need someone who you can count on to give you this support during your own down times. You need someone who you always know will be there for you to provide you with the encouragement and affirmation you need during the time you are suffering and to celebrate with you when you triumph.

Lifelong learning” is a phrase so trite it makes your teeth hurt, but being a good mentor means showing your child that learning doesn’t stop when someone hands you a diploma. Not by treacly speech, but by everyday immersion in a life that celebrates learning interesting things and doing challenging, meaningful work.

he had bought a ticket for the High Holy Day services being held in the Shrine Auditorium. He walked in expecting to find a welcoming communal atmosphere; instead, the first thing they did was raise funds for some cause. He was shocked—and stood up and walked out. His experience had been that a shul was a place for a community of people to come together to celebrate meaningful rituals. This was more like the department-store version of religious observance.

Showing participants in a positive light may be the first time some parents have had their child celebrated at all, let alone publicly. The church cannot underestimate the meaningful way this affects a family of a child with special needs. Using the public venue of a worship service will shape the entire church's view of disability, reminding them of God's value for everyone.

Some businesses take a unique approach to this. Footwear brand Toms, already beloved thanks to its renowned blend of “social purpose” and product, forgoes splashy celebrity marketing campaigns. Instead, they engage and elevate real customers. During the summer of 2016, Toms engaged more than 3.5 million people in a single day using what they call tribe power. The company tapped into its army of social media followers for its annual One Day Without Shoes initiative to gather millions of Love Notes on social media. However, Toms U.K. marketing manager Sheela Thandasseri explained that their tribe’s Love Notes are not relegated to one day. “Our customers create social content all the time showing them gifting Toms or wearing them on their wedding day, and they tag us because they want us to be part of it.”2 Toms uses customer experience management platform Sprinklr to aggregate interactions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Toms then engages in a deep analysis of the data generated by its tribe, learning what customers relish and dislike about its products, stores, and salespeople so they can optimize their Complete Product Experience (CPE). That is an aggressive, all-in approach that extracts as much data as possible from every customer interaction in order to see patterns and craft experiences. Your approach might differ based on factors ranging from budget limitations to privacy concerns. But I can attest that earning love does not necessarily require cutting-edge technology or huge expenditures. What it does require is a commitment to delivering the building blocks of lovability that I reviewed in the previous chapter. Lovability begins with a mindset that makes it a priority. The building blocks are feelings — hope, confidence, fun. If you stack them up over and over again, eventually you will turn those feelings into a tower of meaningful benefits for everyone with a stake in your business, including owners, investors, employees, and customers. Now let’s look more closely at those benefits and the groups they affect.

Faith and Glory blends spirituality and support through beautifully crafted products. Our range includes apparel, jewelry, mugs, and candles, each carrying a message of hope and faith. Rooted in meaningful designs and expressions, we inspire and uplift, celebrating glory in every message. Join us in embracing faith and awareness.

When employees feel set up to succeed, they love working. Work becomes a major source of personal fulfillment and satisfaction. Generally, employees would prefer to engage in meaningful and proportionately challenging work rather than to sit at their desk and scroll on social media all day. Employees want to put their abilities to use when the impact is seen and celebrated. They want that bucket of berries they foraged for to be noticed and enjoyed by others. Otherwise, what is the purpose? They want to experience how good it feels to meet expectations and be seen as contributing, competent, and important. It’s how we’re wired.

hunger lust drives many personalities to stand out from the crowd. Members of the new generation seek celebrity status regardless of the cost. We have each engaged in or witnessed someone else’s feeble attempts to define their personal strand of uniqueness derived through acquisitions, nationalism, body piercings, serving as rabid fans of various conglomeration’s sports teams, or by participating in other cult-like activities. Fervently engaging in these or similar misguided identity markers is laughable. Our real identity marker comes from engagement in a succession of character building experiences that integrate the conscious and unconscious mind into a coherent whole. A person defines the contours of their life through a series of life affirming actions, many of which choices initially seem disjointed from any functional significance beyond meeting the needs of our immediate family and mollifying our own selfishness. Akin to silent film actors of yesteryear, we must each play some worthwhile role in the symposium of life which staccato orchestra of spring beauty embraces every nook and cranny of planet Earth.

The term Significant describes its quality, not quantity, as quote and couplet, verdict, butter, perfume, honey, and such extracts can be Significant; whereas a lengthy article, and judiciary, or milk, flowers, and fruits may not. Similarly, a few meaningful words about celebrities define as more Significant than a meaningless lengthy article, when a journalistic writer writes such wide-scale passages that value that as Gold, and when it writes a scholar that becomes a Diamond. Thus, never consider Significant should be lengthy; otherwise, you commit that you are ignorant.

It is vital that children see meaningful images of people who look like them being represented in a positive way that celebrates and acknowledges difference. -Dr Stella Louis

One meaningful way to celebrate the Solstice is to consider it a sacred time of reflection, release, restoration, and renewal.

when we see someone who we don’t like, we disagree with, or is outside our group stumble, fall, or fail, it’s tempting to celebrate that suffering together and to stir up collective emotion. That kind of bonding might feel good for a moment, but nothing that celebrates the humiliation or pain of another person builds lasting connection.

It may seem absurd to suggest that the canyon is somehow incomplete without the dam, but the speed run underscores the inescapable truth that every journey not only begins at the dam but is also enriched and challenged by it. And together the canyon and the dam offer a far more meaningful reflection of the society that claims them both: its triumphs and its failures; what it has been willing to sacrifice and what it has chosen to preserve; the things it celebrates and those it mourns; the price it has willingly

When we are relieved or happy to see someone held accountable for wrongdoing, we’re not automatically celebrating their suffering, but more often we’re grateful for the healing that accountability brings to those who have been affected by the wrongdoing.

I say “counterfeit” because when we see someone who we don’t like, we disagree with, or is outside our group stumble, fall, or fail, it’s tempting to celebrate that suffering together and to stir up collective emotion. That kind of bonding might feel good for a moment, but nothing that celebrates the humiliation or pain of another person builds lasting connection.

At the heart of every good idea or great business is a clear sense of purpose and a vision for the future its creator wants to see. Research into neuroplasticity and how the mind changes the brain has proven what celebrated thinkers like Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, have intuitively known: we are more likely to make progress when we believe in the significance of what we’re doing. In one study carried out by researchers at Stanford University, students who were encouraged to view tedious academic tasks as stepping stones to college, rather than as means to an end, found learning more meaningful. If having a sense of purpose can improve your chances of success, it’s vital to imagine how what you’re working on creates change and to articulate your reasons for wanting to do it. Why you? Why this? Why now? Why for them? Why there? Why that way and not this? What’s your story and how will you stay true to it?

When you finally meet someone with whom you can celebrate your failures as well,it's called love.

Life intrinsically has no meaning. You came with nothing. You will go with nothing. But you have the opportunity to make your Life meaningful. You can do this in small doses by doing multiple things that you love doing. Or you can do this expansively by being engaged with a larger-than-you cause, your Purpose. Here 'meaningful' really means making each moment count, by living it fully, by celebrating it! Simply, as long as you do what makes you come alive, even if you don't define it or connect it with a sense of Purpose, you are living meaningfully!

The ten-year reunion had been an odd experience. I’d gone mostly out of curiosity, but had found the evening awkward and anticlimactic. Most people had turned out to be exactly who I’d expected them to be. Our class had produced no celebrities or mega successes. Everyone had extremely mundane and commonplace jobs, except for Donal Larkin’s twin sister Shannon, who’d joined the State Department. There had been a lot of strained small talk with people who didn’t remember me, as well as a few uncomfortable conversations with people I’d forgotten who remembered me well. One woman whose name and face rang no bell whatsoever had proudly produced her yearbook to show off the heartfelt note I’d written to her. There on the page, in my own handwriting, was a lengthy message I had no memory of writing, extolling our meaningful and abiding friendship. The whole experience had been unsettling. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to repeating it, but I supposed since I was on the reunion committee now I had no choice but to attend the thirty-year.

Wives require more than a good provider, they need a Godly man who guides them to trust in God, the ultimate Provider. A godly man celebrates and supports the gifts of a godly woman without feeling threatened. Young men, especially those without a strong male role model, desperately need positive influences. The church provides an opportunity for great, godly men to step up and inspire these young men, giving men a meaningful mission to shape the next generation.

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

In conclusion, a eulogy for the living is a powerful way to express our love and appreciation for the people in our lives.

It is precisely in the situation of a local congregation that the Lord’s Supper fulfills its function as synaxis most meaningfully. This is the situation from which Paul’s statements about synaxis in 1 Corinthians proceed. It was the local situation which occasioned his reproofs against lovelessness. Likewise in such a situation, and only in such a situation, is there opportunity for a concrete agape, which is still something different from a general love for mankind. We cannot concede that the love which we owe also to those outside the boundaries of our churches is impaired when in our liturgical fellowship we unite locally for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

In this manner, my brain constructed my experience of emotion. My particular movements and sensations were not a fingerprint for sadness. With different predictions, my skin would cool rather than flush and my stomach would remain unknotted, yet my brain could still transform the resulting sensations into sadness. Not only that, but my original thumping heart, flushed face, knotted stomach, and tears could become meaningful as a different emotion, such as anger or fear, instead of sadness. Or in a very different situation, like a wedding celebration, those same sensations could become joy or gratitude.

Celebrating those moments when we have made a difference in our work, whether it is in a caring profession or in something totally different, can boost our sense of purpose and our sense of efficacy. Yet how often do we do this, either on an individual or a team level? When teams learn from previous experiences it tends to be learning from mistakes. When we think back over our performance at work it is often to reflect on how we can do better. Yet we can also purposefully take the time to print out emails where people have thanked us, to look over cards from people who have acknowledged something meaningful we have done for them and to notice moments in our day where we’ve had a really nice time, or at least felt like we’ve done our job well. Even a small amount of this can make a really big difference.

Harvard professor Teresa Amabile concurs. After examining 12,000 daily diary entries by several hundred workers, she found that the single largest motivator was making progress in meaningful work.16 Wins needn’t be large to be meaningful. When you enter a new role, set up small “high-probability” targets and celebrate when you hit them.

A term Significant describes its quality, not quantity, as quote and couplet, verdict, butter, perfume, honey, and such extracts can be Significant; whereas, a lengthy article, and judiciary, or milk, flowers and fruits may not. Similarly, a few meaningful words about celebrities define as Significant than a meaningless lengthy article, when a journalistic writer writes such wide-scale passages that value as Gold and when it writes a scholar that becomes Diamond. Thus, never consider Significant should be lengthy; otherwise, you commit that you are ignorant.

The central contradiction in Peterson’s message is that he both uncritically celebrates capitalist “free markets” and sounds the alarm at the destructive toll those markets inevitably take on relationships and communities. Our message, however, must reject Peterson’s traditionalist and pseudo-libertarian worldview in favor of a vision in which everyone has the economic freedom—as in, freedom from economics—to pursue their own preferred vision of the good life. Want to have a traditional family and take your seven kids to a traditional church? Go for it. Want to live in a tri-sexual compound and practice Wiccanism? Do that. Where Peterson wants to “enforce” monogamy, socialists like me want to give everyone the freedom to make more meaningful choices in their lives by creating a world in which financial stress doesn’t make it difficult to maintain relationships, people who want to start families can, and we aren’t all too overworked, overstressed, and socially atomized to go out and meet people in the first place (or too afraid of indigency that we stay in toxic relationships).

Remember that when you leave the world, you can die in contentment only if you have made this world a little more worth living in, a little more meaningful, with a little more dancing, celebrating. If you have added a little festivity to it, a little laughter, a little sense of humor, if you have been able to light a small lamp of light and you have been able to disperse a little darkness from the world, you will die in utter joy – you are fulfilled, your life has been of fruition and flowering. Otherwise people die in misery.

There are plenty of folks in great relationships without the marriage certificate, but we felt there was something meaningful and important in the declaration of our feelings, something that for us was essential. That’s why there is a statement of vows, a public promise, a blessing of your union, a celebration. When you do this in front of your friends, your family, your world, it’s a coming out of sorts, an announcement to everyone that this is how we’re going to officially roll from here on in, together, two for the road.

The more we want our students to buy in to our race conversations, the clearer we must make our purposes. Whether it is to celebrate the beauty of a culture, solve a hard problem, contribute to scholarship, or ultimately publish, our students must never be confused about why they are being asked to take such a demanding journey.

we essentially wait until people die to praise and celebrate all their contributions in life and “fill their bucket.