2.SPEECH BY MEERA GANDHI
Humanitarian Award from SASA Los Angeles
Dear Friends of SASA
It is a tremendous honor to receive this Humanitarian Award tonight.
Thank you. There are probably many more people more deserving of this award tonight and so I am even more humbled to receive it. I offer this to those who have lost so much in the recent Tsunami tragedy and to my friends Kim and Raju Panjwani and Aloise and Dominic Price who were in the Tsunami and thankfully are alive today.
As a person I am drawn to any cause where I feel I can make a difference, whether it is with Battered women, through Safety Net, or helping Women and Children’s causes where lives can just be a little better because of my small efforts. Anyway, I do not want to talk about that tonight. I would like to take this time to share some other thoughts with so many young people like you who have joined me here tonight.
Scientists have now discovered through radioactive testing that the earth is approximately forty-five billion years old and that we possibly have another two and a half billion years to go before the sun will burn itself out. If this is the case, when we look at a billion years, we look at eternity; we really start to look at things differently. Will something really matter a fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, a billion years from now, two billion years from now? When this becomes the question and when we begin to look at life that way, suddenly it’s so not important we think of how unfairly we’ve been treated. It is not important.
What becomes important in the big scheme of things is how am I living my life today to truly ensure that my soul is so light and has so much light energy that it’s really out there in the universe, transmitting energy and not just dying out as a dark ember of coal. Holding on to all the insults, holding on to all the problems, holding on to what people did, what people said, thinking of ways to get back, thinking of ways to get even none of it is important. What is important is to take each day and to live each life with so much fullness and so much compassion and happiness and having spread so much goodness that when you out your head on the pillow at night to sleep, you can truly say that this day was lived to it’s fullest, lived in a way that is worthy, that is worthy of being a human.
There is a great amount of joy, a tremendous amount of joy from helping, doing, caring. When one has anger from things that are done to us and this is natural, one loses perspective and if one doesn’t take a moment to recoup, one soon finds that the negative energy takes over the positive energy and begins to wear us down. The beauty of this is that the opposite works as well. So, if the positive energy takes over a negative situation, then it just wears the negative energy down and soon we are back on track in life, humming along, really able to partake of life the way man was intended to, in a very real, natural, easy way. If you look a dog who is kicked, he yelps in pain and the next minute he gets up and moves on. You see him the next day and he does not recall the hurt. This is the way nature intended us to live our lives. A clean slate each moment in time.
In addition to this issue, nowadays we are so sensitive towards people and what they say and do to us. There is so much anger. The anger we have in us is not dealt with by the process of sitting latent as we have no time- and so at the slightest insult or the slightest bit of hurt, we are making mountains and mountains of this unprocessed anger and shoot out violent venom. This not only hurts the people that are at the receiving end but also hurts our very soul and the core of our own being. We are living a life that is so fast and so much in the future and so much focused on being out there, so focused on reaching somewhere that we are not even aware of the steps we are taking as we rush towards some unknown destination.
A simple way to bring on happiness and instill a change a current state of being, is to simply Smile. Just a smiling look at a person, or a smile in the mirror has a tremendous power of transformation. It is infectious, it’s amazing, and it’s really quite powerful.
So as we continue to walk on this journey of life, in a quest to have a life that is peaceful, happy, full, transformational, we begin to see that a little bit of goodness goes a long way, a little bit of kindness goes a long way, a smile goes a long way. Qualities of heart and mind that don’t cost anything go a long way in improving our life and as well as others.
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This is the most fascinating part of life is that the more you do for others; the more you do for yourself. It is amazing, you just make someone feel good, you feel good; you make someone feel bad, you feel bad. It is a very interesting equation coming back to the Ying and the Yang, coming back to the positive and negative, coming back to even gravity. Gravity on land pulls you down but gravity in water pushes you up, isn’t that interesting? How many of us realize that the polar is negative and positive?
So just everything is uniquely balanced in the universe and we just have to come in, understand it, live it and not try to fight against it. In order to do all this, we need time to think, really be conscious of what we are doing, conscious of what we are saying, and conscious of the outcome we like to affect.
So many of us really successful in the business we run and the meetings we speak at, because we are very conscious of what we would like the outcome to be, of what we would like to achieve and yet when we are dealing with people, we put so little thought into it. We do not think of the impact of our words, we do not look to the end result, the outcome or the impact that our words will have on people and this causes a lot of misery, a lot of unnecessary anxiety and yes stress and in a fast paced world, if we have this constant stress that we are putting on to ourselves, it makes for a pretty miserable existence and it doesn’t have to be that way. We should be able to transform for the better.
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Each one of us has the power to do it and we should use this power wisely and just be happy. It is unique opportunity to live on this earth and it has taken four and a half billion years for the human beings to evolve, it’s taken the universe forty billion years to evolve and become beautiful with its water, with its trees, with it’s light energy, with it’s heat energy, the conditions are perfect and finally we are here, forty-five billion years later.
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Let’s enjoy it and give back.
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Thank you once again.
With Peace and love to you all.