Things I've learned as I grew older

[David Baxter PhD]

For me, these are the big three:

1. Gratitude: Focus on what you have to be grateful for instead of the challenges, hardships, and disappointments you experience in your life.
2. Compassion: this applies both to Self-compassion — be gentle and understanding with yourself when you make mistakes or say or do something that inadvertently hurts someone else; and Other-compassion — practice the same compassion to other people and their mistakes or slip-ups as you practice for yourself.
3. Forgiveness: this should go hand in hand with compassion, self-forgiveness and other-forgiveness.

None of this means that you should become a doormat for other people who want to put you down. It simply means as a bottom line that focusing on what's still positive and good about your life, with or without those people who seem to thrive on meanness and putting others down. Keep negativity from others out of your mind and out of your life.

What are some important things you have learned as you grow older?

 

[Daniel E.]

1. Sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem.

Similarly:

"These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.”
– Najwa Zebian, The Nectar of Pain

2. "Do not engage" with false, transient messages ("noise") from your brain or other people's brains.

3. To reiterate about self-compassion and accepting the human condition:

"The world has and will outlast all of us. It is still going after atom bomb blasts that should not have happened. There have been worse times in history, yet I am not sure I have ever lived through a crazier moment of abrasive fragility. Tension between self-hate and self-love is increasing. Some feel it intensely. In others it works invisibly or, as Freud suggested, through disguises, causing much damage in so many. We are more than compliant–defiant beings. Can we, little by little, discover ways to offset self-hate with deeper love? I do not mean the self-love of egomania, which tramples others and damages oneself as well. There is another love, deeper love that helps, or tries to. We have a deep need—but I can’t quite say what it is. Faith is part of it, but it is much more."

~ Michael Eigen, The Challenge of Being Human (2018)

4. After dealing with a variety of well-paid professionals in different industries:
"Science is a candle in the dark." ~ Carl Sagan

5. All you "have" to do is breathe and stay hydrated. "You were never in control, anyway."

6. When dealing with people who are putting you down: "Always consider the source."