(a passage sent to me by a dear friend... ako lang daw ang kilala nyang super-senti na tyak magugustuhan ko... hehehe. And the funny thing is, tama sya!! Hahaha)

One thing I learned from it all: drinking wine is more than just drinking. You have to know what you are drinking and you have to be able to talk about it. Similarly, just like living life is not enough. We must know what we are living. A life that is not reflected upon isn’t worth living. It belongs to the essence of being human being that we contemplate our life, think about it, discuss it, evaluate it, and form opinion about it. Half of living is reflecting on what being lived. Is it worth? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it old? Is it new? What is all about? The greatest joy as well as the greatest pain of living come not only from what we live but even more from how we think and feel about what we are living. Poverty and wealth, success and failure, beauty and ugliness aren’t just the fact of life. They are realities that are lived very differently by different people, depending on the way they are placed in the larger scheme of things. …Holding the cup of life means looking critically at what we are living. This requires great courage, because when we start looking, we might be terrified by what we see. Questions may arise that we don’t know how to answer. Doubts may come up about the things we thought we were not sure about. Fear may emerge from unexpected places. We are tempted to say, “ Let’s just live life. All this thinking about it only make things harder.” Still, we intuitively know that without looking at life critically we lose our vision and our direction. When we drink the cup without holding it first, we may simply get drunk and wander around aimlessly. ……Like the warrior we must hold our cup and fully claim who we are and what we are called to live. Then we too can shoot for the stars.

Living our lives to others happens every time we speak or act in ways that we make our lives for others. When we are fully able to embrace our own lives, we discover that what we claim we also want to proclaim. A life will held is indeed a life for others. We stop wondering whether our life is better or worse than others and start seeing clearly that when we live our life for others we not only claim our individuality but also proclaim our unique place in the mosaic of the human family.

by Henri Nouwen