I'm reading Anthony de Mello's book Awareness again and last night came to the chapter entitled "Obstacles to Happiness." Here de Mello says:
You're a success in life when you wake up! Then you don't have to apologize to anyone, you don't have to explain anything to anyone, you don't give damn what anybody thinks about you or what anybody says about you. You have no worries; you're happy. That's what I call being a success. Having a good job or being famous or having a great reputation has absolutely nothing to do with happiness or success. Nothing! It is totally irrelevant.As he does so often in this book, he tells a humorous story to illustrate his point:
Did you hear about the lawyer who was presented with a plumber's bill? He said to the plumber, "Hey, you're charging me two hundred dollars an hour. I don't make that kind of money as a lawyer." The plumber said, "I didn't make that kind of money when I was a lawyer either!"
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I stumbled onto your blog and read around it for twenty minutes or so. Not very much that you and I would agree on. But I also read some of your gay movie reviews and suggest this piece on Brokeback Mountain.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lee-harris.org/2459/misunderstanding-brokeback-mountain.
BTW, I found both the original story and the movie deeply moving and in very different ways extraordinarily beautiful.