This Week’s Quotation:
What your world, and the people in it, need most from you is for you to be a sun. When faced with the coldness of other people, or the coldness of the world, return that coldness with your warmth. And in the fire that fuels your warmth, transform what the world gives to you without reaction.
Becoming a Sun, p. 19
The Warmth of the Sun
How do you respond when others are cold to you? Do you wonder, How could someone act like that? Isn’t this what we sometimes end up asking ourselves? How could they be so cold? So uncaring?
Those questions can easily take us down a rabbit hole from which we never return. So what are we supposed to do?
It is a radical step to decide to become a sun. To access the source of our own warmth in the face of what the world sometimes throws at us. There are so many reactive compulsions that can arise…resentment, fear, fighting back, closing down.
The highest emotional intelligence tells us to let go and turn away from the reaction. It tells us that the hope for our own life and our world is simply to be a loving person.
Of course, this is an uncommon kind of love. It is the fire within us that never dies. It is not the kind of love that is just romantic or affectionate with other people because they are that way with us. This is the love of stars burning deep within our souls.
This is loving because love is who you are and what you are made of. This is becoming a sun. Faced with judgment or condemnation. Faced with prejudice and bias. Or faced with the dogged determination to imagine the worst thing that could happen—bring your light. It is the most natural thing for you to do to bring your love, your warmth, and your light,
What does it mean to become a sun?
Every human being is already a sun on the inside—a Being of intense love and light. The difference is that some people have the vision and courage to become a sun on the outside. They let the love and light inside them out. This is our human destiny.
