Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The French has a phrase: “Suit l’amour, l’amour fuit. Fuit l’amour, l’amour suit”, it means “Following love, love flees. Fleeing love, love follows.” (Theo tình, tình phớt. Phớt tình, tình theo).

This phenomenon is correct not only in love affair, but also true in almost everything else. For example, you want to be famous and you do everything to be famous, but you don’t become famous. However, you only focus on working and don’t care about being famous, then you become famous.

Why?

There are some psychological elements in the issue:

1. When chasing after fame, you may run around chasing fame, and do not focus on your job, whatever your job is. It is hard for a lousy worker to become famous.

2. People don’t like and don’t respect fame chasers – they look cheap and stupid.

3. But if you focus on your job and don’t care about fame, you will become supergood in your job and, therefore, automatically become famous.

The issue boils down to one point: Focus on substance and ignore superfluity.

The wisdom is clear. But you may be surprised to know that too many people chase after superfluous stuff all their life. The phenomenon is especially true among young people – teenagers, college students, new university graduates, young professionals. Young people lack the experience to distinguish superfluity from substance, until life beats them for a while.

Even older adults make the same mistake at a higher level – they focus on their material life and ignore their spiritual side. But someday they may wake up and wonder: “What am I doing? What I’ve been doing all my life? For what? I don’t see any meaning. Why this emptiness in my heart now? What is my purpose in life? I don’t see any purpose, other than repeating the same boring job for 30 years now.”

Too many people wake up that way in their midlife. You can call that the middle-age crisis.

You will not have that kind of crisis if you aways take care of your spiritual life in parallel with your material life.

Don’t forget we all have two sides of living.

With compassion,

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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