Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Most of the things we should do, we already know. The question is: Are we doing them? If not, why?

Say, you should not get angry. When was the last time you get angry? For the last month, how many times you get angry?

You should not lie. When was the last time you lie? On the average, how many times you lie in a day?

You should eat good food for your body. When was the last time you eat food that you know harmful to your body?

You should quite smoking? Are you still smoking?
…

There are many things we know we shouldn’t do, we do anyway. And there are many things we know we should do, we don’t do anyway.

Why?

I am not talking about the rare occasions we do something irregular for some reason. I am talking about things we do often although we know we shouldn’t do, or vice versa.

There are many things we have learned and have agreed that we should do, but we still don’t do them. Why?

I think the reason is obvious: We generally don’t care much about rules of conduct and good manners. We know them, but we simply live with the way we have lived since ever. We don’t have self-discipline to force us to do what we should do.

But life needs discipline. Self-discipline will take you very far and non-discipline keeps you stay in one place, generally not moving 1cm.

If you have children, especially teens, you see their biggest problem is that they don’t do what they should do and do what they shouldn’t do. Many teens with that strong undisciplined disposition are very difficult for parents or teachers to teach. Sometimes you will have to quit trying with them.

But we are not talking about teens. We are talking about adults, parents. Many people don’t have self-discipline to do anything well, and those people probably can’t be good parents to train their children, because children learn by copying their parents.

Actually, we all learn many things very well as we grow up. The bad news is that most of the things we learn and do in our adult life are bad stuff – lying, cheating, fighting, back stabbing, betraying… Good things we do learn, except that few people use them in their living.

Don’t under estimate our bad adult life. You go buying things in the street in VN, you have probably a 70% chance of being cheated, especially if you are a tourist or a newcomer to the area. Our society has serious problems with ethics. Look at all kinds of officials and business people going to jail for long vacation, then you know that our society has big ethics problems. We’re lucky to have a government keen on cleaning up. Extremely hard to develop a country when there are too many unethical folks in the country.

But we don’t need to talk about the country. We talk about our self. If we don’t know what we live for, then at least there is an obvious goal in the human gene – our life is a journey toward perfection. We will never be perfect, but we always walk toward perfection, every day. Why? Because that is human’s purpose since the beginning of time – we always live to better our self every day.

Wish we all travel well in life.

With compassion,

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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