Lose yourself in a cause greater than yourself!
One of my favorite quotes and the battle cry of Ordinary Miracles is: “The surest way to happiness is to lose yourself in a cause greater than yourself”. But what does that really mean and why would anyone do it? The best way I can describe it is to selflessly work for a cause that you believe in passionately and do so with such vigor and energy that it causes you to become distracted from all of life’s ailments. Losing yourself in a cause greater than yourself requires you to have a passion for serving others, to be loving and compassionate towards others and to be grateful for all that you have as well as the times you have felt you didn’t have much to be thankful for.
The servant attitude is the desire to enrich and enhance the lives of others through unselfish servanthood. This is expressed through an authentic humility that serves others and leads them to become servants as well. Servanthood can also be defined as taking your eyes off yourself and putting them on to others. This quote I think captures the spirit of servanthood quite nicely.
“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Losing yourself also requires love and compassion which has to do with our ability to connect with others with skill, warmth, and genuine compassion. Its about authentic intimacy, and about being in meaningful relationships. As human beings we are hardwired to connect, we are programmed for kindness and we can use our love and compassion to make the world a better place and lose ourselves in the process.
Finally, gratitude is a sure quality essential to losing yourself. Gratitude is the quality of being grateful or thankful. Applied to losing yourself it means being thankful for the good as well as the not so good. It means being thankful for that job promotion but also for the time that you were unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, which made you stronger and better appreciate some of the things that are normally taken for granted.
In short losing yourself means getting so involved in the betterment of others through servanthood, love and gratitude that it becomes a distraction from your own struggles. Ordinary Miracles and JUST DO IT ANYWAY are the causes I’ve chosen to lose myself in. Find yourself a cause to lose yourself in or lose yourself with me.
“Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do”
Gian Carlo Menotti
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Sincerely,
Adriano
Losing myself in a cause greater than myself.
