변하는것.. 변하지 않는것.. 시간이 흘러도 변하지 않는것들... 그리고 변해가는 것들...

수행자는 기도로써 영혼의 양식을 삼는다.
기도는 인간에게 주어진 마지막 자산이다.
사람의 이성과 지성을 가지고도
어떻게 할 수 없을 때 기도가 우리를 도와준다.

기도는 무엇을 요구하는 것이 아니라
그저 간절한 소망이다.
따라서 기도에는 목소리가 아니라
진실한 마음이 담겨야 한다.
진실이 담기지 않은 말은 그 울림이 없기 때문이다.

누구나 자기 존재의 근원을 찾고자 하는 사람은
먼저 간절한 마음으로 기도를 해야 한다.
진정한 기도는 종교적인 의식이나 형식이 필요 없다.
오로지 간절한 마음만 있으면 된다.
순간순간 간절한 소망을 담은 진지한
기도가 당신의 영혼을 다스려 줄 것이다.

그리고 기도에 필요한 것은 침묵이다.
말은 생각을 일으키고 정신을 흩뜨려 놓는다.
우주의 언어인 거룩한
그 침묵은 안과 밖이 하나가 되게 한다.

어느 인도의 스승은 말하고 있다.
'사람의 몸에 음식이 필요하듯
우리의 영혼에는 기도가 필요하다.'

기도는 하루를 여는 아침의 열쇠이고,
하루를 마감하는 저녁의 빗장이다.

출처 : 살아 있는 것은 다 행복하라 / 법정 잠언집


=============================================================================

지난번 할머니 병문안 갔을 때 자원이가 출국전에 이 책을 선물로 줬다. 요즘 간간히 읽고 있는데 좋은 글들이 참 많다. 때로 잊거나 혹은 인지하지 못하고 살던걸 일깨워 주는 소중한 글들이 담겨있다. 늦었지만 2010 경인년은 영혼을 살찌우는 한 해가 되도록 다짐을 해본다.

출처 : http://article.joins.com/article/article.asp?ctg=1200&Total_ID=2754687

Remarks of Bill Gates
Harvard Commencement
(Text as prepared for delivery)

President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”

I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson has called me “Harvard’s most successful dropout.” I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.

Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world’s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.

I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: “We’re not quite ready, come see us in a month,” which was a good thing, because we hadn’t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world. This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.” I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.

But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: “Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We’re determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent.”

The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.

We don’t read much about these deaths. The media covers what’s new – and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it’s easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it’s difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It’s hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don’t know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.

Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks “How can I help?,” then we can get action – and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have — whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand – and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach – is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work – so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person’s life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I’ve ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn’t bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software – but why can’t we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can’t get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.

Still, I’m optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of our caring – and that’s why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology, the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we’ve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: “I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation.”

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.

At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don’t. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don’t have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.

We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.

What for?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world’s worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world’s most privileged people learn about the lives of the world’s least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.

My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don’t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

Knowing what you know, how could you not?

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck.

게으름은 느림이 아니다 삶의 방향성을 잃고 제자리걸음하는 것

나도 혹시 ‘바쁜 게으름뱅이’?… 자가진단 및 처방

• 김윤덕기자 sion@chosun.com
  입력 : 2007.02.27 23:14
•  
• 봄이 일찍 찾아와서일까? 따스한 바람결에 온몸이 나른하다. 여건만 된다면 마냥 게으름 피우며 빈둥대기 딱 좋은 요즘. 이를 예견한 듯 서점가엔 ‘굿바이! 게으름’ ‘게으른 남편’ ‘게으른 건강법’ 등 ‘게으름’을 다룬 책들이 인기다. 그렇다고 게으름이 봄(春)과 관련 있다는 뜻은 아니다. “춘곤증은 계절적 변화에 따른 일시적 현상일 뿐 게으름의 원인은 아니다”라고 말하는 ‘굿바이! 게으름’의 저자 문요한(정신과 전문의)씨는 “다만 병적으로 게으른 사람들은 만물이 생동하는 봄에 대해 ‘상대적 위축감’ ‘자책감’을 느껴 더더욱 게을러질 수 있다”고 충고했다.
• ◆눈코뜰새없이 바쁜데 게으름뱅이라고?

  • 일단 자신이 게으른지 아닌지 진단해보는 게 중요하다. 6가지 ‘게으름뱅이들의 단골 레퍼토리’는 이렇다. ▲첫째, 게으름을 신중함으로 미화한다. “아직 확실치가 않아. 실패하면 큰일이니 좀 더 알아보고 다음에 해야지”라며 선택과 시작을 미룬다. ▲둘째, 눈앞의 즐거움에 집착한다. ‘오늘까지만 놀고 내일부터 잘 살자!’ 중독에 빠진 사람들의 흔한 변명. ▲셋째, 게으름을 효율성으로 미화한다. ‘닥치면 다 하게 돼 있어’ 하며 마감이 닥쳐야 일을 시작하는 사람들. ▲넷째, ‘게으름은 우리 집안 내력이야’ ‘회사 일이 워낙 바빠서…’ 하며 게으름은 자신의 선택이 아니라고 부인하는 경우. ▲다섯째, 게으름을 철학으로 미화한다. ‘내가 하기 싫은 일은 절대 안 해!’ ‘일에는 때가 있는 법’ ‘인생? 즐기면서 사는 거지’ 등등. ▲게으름을 여유로 위장하는 것도 특징이다. 그러나 여유와 게으름은 다르다. ‘여유’란 할 일을 하면서 충분히 쉬는 ‘능동적 선택’이지만, ‘게으름’은 할 일도 안 하면서 제대로 쉬지도 못하는 ‘선택 회피’에 불과하다.
  • 
  • ◆자기 비난이 게으름의 원인…‘변화일기’ 쓰세요

    그럼 어떻게 해야 게으름에서 벗어날까? 문요한씨는 “우선 완벽주의에서 벗어나야 게으름도 떨칠 수 있다”고 충고한다. ▲세부 준비에만 급급하다 시간을 다 허비하는 완벽주의 성향이 원인. 당장 시험공부를 시작해야 하는데 그 와중에 꼼꼼하게 책상 정리하고 색연필로 멋진 계획표를 짜는 게으름뱅이들이 얼마나 많은가. ▲자기 비난도 떨쳐버려야 한다. 자신의 능력을 의심하고 스스로를 비난하기 때문에 망설이고 미루는 데 능하다. ▲똑같은 하루를 반복하는 것도 게으름. 삶의 방향을 찾기 위해 잠시 하던 일을 중단하자. 변화를 위해서는 ‘이행기’ ‘혼란기’가 필수다. ▲‘변화 일기’를 쓰는 것도 한 방법. 하루 5개씩 자신에게 질문을 던져 짧게 답한다. 삶에 질서를 부여해준다. “제 환자였던 50세 남성은 알코올 중독에 벗어나기 위해 매일 성경책을 필사했어요. 1시간을 쓰기도 하고 어떤 날엔 7~8시간씩 써내려 갔고요. 성경구절을 적든, 일기를 쓰든 자신의 마음을 가다듬고 에너지를 모으는 시간을 꼭 만들어보세요.”

                 반지에 새겨진 글귀

유대 미드라시(midrash)에 이런 이야기가 있습니다.
어느 날 다윗 왕이 궁중의 한 보석 세공인을 불러
명령을 내렸습니다.

"나를 위하여 반지 하나를 만들되 거기에 내가 매우
큰 승리를 거둬 그 기쁨을 억제하지 못할 때
그것을 조절할 수 있는 글귀를 새겨 넣어라.
그리고 동시에 그 글귀가 내가 절망에 빠져 있을 때는
나를 이끌어 낼 수 있어야 하느니라."

보석 세공인은 명령대로 곧 매우 아름다운 반지 하나를
만들었습니다. 그러나 적당한 글귀가 생각나지 않아
걱정을 하고 있었습니다.

어느 날 그는 솔로몬 왕자를 찾아갔습니다.
그에게 도움을 구하기 위해서였습니다.

"왕의 황홀한 기쁨을 절제해 주고 동시에 그가
낙담했을 때 북돋워 드리기 위해서는 도대체
어떤 말을 써 넣어야 할까요?"

솔로몬이 대답했습니다. 이런 말을 써 넣으시요.

"이것 역시 곧 지나가리라!"
"왕이 승리의 순간에 이것을 보면 곧 자만심이
가라앉게 될 것이고, 그가 낙심중에 그것을
보게 되면 이내 표정이 밝아질 것입니다."

                     - 홍 인 실 -