On the day of his inauguration as 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama received this message: love your wife, play with your daughters, BE HAPPY. Oh, and don't buy too many cars.
I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster
that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for
bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you
do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a
schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your
gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. Not to mention your brave and
precious grandmother.* And so on. One gathers that your family is
large. We are used to seeing men in the White House become juiceless
and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children
looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy
that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your
family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: it is
so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy,
relaxed state, you can model real success, which is only what so many
people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses
and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, but
this is because it is not clear to them yet that success is truly an
inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.
That's from Alice Walker. She's awesome. We should all take her words to heart, because everything she says is within the reach of all of us.
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