David BrooksĬommitment is the enemy of resistance, for it is the serious promise to press on, to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down. Most of life is choosing what you already chose, just as all writing is rewriting and all commitment-making is recommitment. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect. To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. I think that is what my husband has done. If you give your life to a cause in which you believe, and if it is right and just, and if your life comes to an end as a result of this, then your life could not have been spent in a more redemptive way. Self dedication is a spiritual experience. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh. Love is a conversion to humanity - a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called “love.” Love is a choice - not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.įor this reason loving involves commitment. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Whatever it is, say yes with your whole heart & simple as it sounds that’s all the excuse life needs to grab you by the hands and start to dance. Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way. bell hooksĪll too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling. The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be. it’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it whether you choose to persevere. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. Art TurockĪ wise person decides slowly but abides by these decisions. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permit. There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a “getaway.” We cannot love and be limited. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. For this reason mastery demands all of a person. Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.

Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps.

Committed quotes