The World According to Mister Rogers - Book Notes

 Recently I came across two books by Fred Rogers at the library. The first one I read is The World According to Mister Rogers - Important Things to Remember. It's a short book, yet one filled with a lot of wisdom and things to reflect upon. Below are some of my favorite passages from the book. 

- Some days, doing "the best we can" may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect - on any front - and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else. 

- It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach out for help and comfort when we need it. 

- Who you are inside is what helps you make and do everything in life. 

- Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing. 

- You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully, your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. 

- All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Keneth Koch once said, "You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!"

- I believe it's a fact of life that what we have is less important than what we make out of what we have. The same holds true for families. It's not how many people there are in a family that counts, but rather the feelings among the people who are there. 

- To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now. 

- It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life. 

- Mutually caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain. 

- Each one of us contributes in some unique way to the composition of life.

- I believe that infants and babies whose mothers give them loving comfort whenever and however they can are truly the fortunate ones. I think they're more likely to find life's times of trouble manageable, and I think they may also turn out to be the adults most able to pass loving concern along to the generations that follow after them. 

- You bring all you ever were and are to any relationship you have today. 

- Imaging something may be the first step in making it happen, but it takes the real time and real efforts of real people to learn things, make things, turn thoughts into deeds or visions into inventions.

- There is no normal life that is free of pain. It's the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth. 

- As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has - or ever will have - something inside that is unique to all time. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.

- Anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me. 

- We want to raise our children so that they can take a sense of pleasure in both their own heritage and the diversity of others. 

- When you combine your own intuition with a sensitivity to other people's feelings and moods, you may be close to the origins of valuable human attributes such as generosity, altruism, compassion, sympathy, and empathy. 

- Spend one minute thinking of someone who has made a difference in the person you have become. 

-As you play together in a symphony orchestra, you can appreciate that each musician has something fine to offer. Each one is different though, and you each have a different "song to sing." When you sing together, you make one voice. That's true of all endeavors, not just musical ones. Finding ways to harmonize our uniqueness with the uniqueness of others can be the most fun - and the most rewarding - of all.

- Who in your life has been such a servant to you...who has helped you love the good that grows within you? Let's just take ten seconds to think of some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us in life - those who have encouraged us to become who we are tonight - just ten seconds of silence. 
    No matter where they are - either here or in heaven - imagine how pleased those people must be to know that you thought of them right now. 
     We all have only one life to live on earth. And...we have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways. 

- If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourselves that you leave at every meeting with another person. 

- Whether we're a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior, or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we're acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.

- The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away. 

- The purpose of life is to listen - to yourself, to your neighbor, to your world and to God and, when the time comes, to respond in as helpful a way as you can find...from within and without. 

- The world needs a sense of worth, and it will achieve it only by its people feeling that they are worthwhile. 

- In The Little Prince there is a phrase, "L'essential est invisible pour les yeux." (What is essential is invisible to the eyes.) The closer we get to know the truth of that sentence, the closer I feel we get to wisdom. 

- I find out more and more every day how important it is for people to share their memories. 

-  Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.