Hallmark Good Morning Quotes

We advertise good friendships as part of the Complete Teenage Experience, because good friendships make for great stories. Content creators romanticize adolescent friendships the same way Hallmark movies treat love: there is a lid for every pot, a yin for every yang, and a savior for every screwup. Turn on any Netflix original movie about teenagers or read any great YA book, and you will see that the perfect sidekick (funny! supportive! quirky! endlessly loyal!) is a fixture in each teen’s life. In reality, middle school friendships play out less like Netflix originals, and more like those toy commercials that came on during Saturday morning cartoons when we were kids. As an only child, I remember yearning to have the same fun those kids were having, begging my parents for the Barbie Jeep or Hot Wheels Track until they gave in. But soon after ripping the toy from its packaging, I came to the stark realization that it was nothing like advertised. Those kids were only pretending to have fun, the set designers made the toys seem infinitely cooler than they actually were, and more often than not, we didn’t even have the right-sized batteries. What a colossal disappointment! Especially when those kids on TV looked like they were having the time of their lives.

So what you’re saying is you never want any kindness, empathy, or sympathy from me. Right, if I want sympathy, I’ll get it from Hallmark cards in a dose I can handle.

After their time in the monastery, most young men and women will return to their villages, having completed their training with the elders. They are now accepted as “ripe,” as initiated men and women, respected in their community. Outwardly they will have learned the religious forms and sacred rituals of the Buddhist community. Inwardly, these ancient forms are intended to awaken an unshakable virtue and inner respect, fearlessness in the face of death, self-reliance, wisdom, and profound compassion. These qualities give one who leaves the monastery the hallmark of a mature man or woman. Perhaps as you read about this ordination process, its beauty will strike a chord in you that intuitively knows about the need for initiations. This does not mean that you have to enter a monastery to seek this remarkable and wonderful training. By reading about this tradition, you may simply awaken that place in yourself, which exists in each of us, that longs for wholeness and integrity, because the awakening that comes through initiation is a universal story. In our time we need to reclaim rites of passage, we need to honor elders, we need to find ways to remind our young people and the whole of our communities of the sacredness of life, of who we really are. Remember, too, that initiation comes in many forms. I have a friend who has three children under the age of five. This is a retreat as intensive as any other, including sitting up all night in the charnel grounds. Marriage and family are a kind of initiation. As Gary Snyder says, All of us are apprentices to the same teacher that all masters have worked with—reality. Reality says: Master the twenty-four hours. Do it well without self-pity. It is as hard to get children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha Hall on a cold morning. One is not better than the other. Each can be quite boring. They both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms: changing the car filters, wiping noses, going to meetings, sitting in meditation, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick. Don’t let yourself think that one or more of these distracts you from the serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties to escape so that we may do our practice that will put us on the path. It IS our path.