Sayings to Live By

Last year I wrote about adages that I try to live by.

More recently I’ve been collecting quotes from social media and pop culture and posting them on the wall beside my desk to remind myself of how I want to live.

Some of the quotes I’ve written down aren’t really about making a difference. Toward the end of my favorite anime (Hunter x Hunter), one character shares the following bit of advice: “Enjoy the little detours to the fullest, because that’s where you’ll find the things more important than what you want.” That seemed particularly apropos during a pandemic, but I don’t know that living by it will help me make a difference (other than perhaps being a more pleasant person to be around).

But three of the sayings I’ve collected can, I think, help us change the world in some small way. Here they are:

“Gentle but fierce”

I follow Mark Ruffalo on Twitter, not so much because I’m a fan (although I do like his work in the Avengers movies), but because I’m interested in what he has to say. Because I interact with others on Twitter far more than I interact with him, he doesn’t usually pop up at the top of my feed. Somehow, his birthday post last year managed to catch my attention — again, not for the reason you might think. The post features (tasteful) photos of him in a bubble bath. But what caught my eye was his message, which ended, “Set out to defy the limitations life, self, and others have in mind for you. Be gentle but fierce about it.”

I rather like his message about defying limitations, but my favorite part was the phrase “gentle but fierce.” And the more I thought about, the more I thought it’s a great way to handle life in general, not just limitations that are imposed on you. Angry confrontations are all around us; the world needs our gentleness. But gentleness doesn’t mean failing to stand up for what’s right. That’s where we are called to be fierce. What would the world look like if we resolved to try to embody being “gentle but fierce”?

“Live fully, love wastefully”

This is pulled from a quotation from John Shelby Spong, a retired bishop of the Episcopal Church. I believe I also saw this somewhere on social media, probably Instagram. The full quotation (more or less — I’ve seen different versions online) is “live fully, love wastefully, and be all that we can be.” I was presumptuous and decided I could improve on it. First, I believe that if you are living fully, you are already being all that you can be, so the third part of the quotation seems redundant to me. “Be all that we can be” also sounds far too much like an Army commercial from my youth for me to take it seriously. So I just wrote down “Live fully and love wastefully” and taped it to my wall.

My insistence on editing Spong aside, I do love the idea of living fully and loving wastefully — especially the loving wastefully bit. Again, it seems to me that the world would change drastically if we would try to live by those words, pouring out love, loving others extravagantly, recklessly, even wastefully. What if we loved others with no regard for whether or not our love would be appreciated or returned? What a beautiful waste! It’s a goal I’ll never fully achieve, but it’s one worth striving for.

“That’s how we’re gonna win. Not by fighting what we hate but saving what we love.”

If you’re a Star Wars nerd, you’ll recognize this line. Rose Tico says it to Finn toward the end of The Last Jedi after preventing Finn from sacrificing himself for the good of the Resistance.

Some fans hate that line, asking: Wasn’t that what Finn was trying to do — save the Resistance? They make a valid point. The writer gave Rose a great line, but he put it in a questionable context. (I wonder, though… Was Finn really acting out of a desire to save what he loved, or was he actually driven by his hatred of the First Order? In this series, the answer to that question really matters.)

Context aside, I love the notion of focusing our efforts on saving what we love rather than fighting what we hate. If we focus on fighting what we hate, then even if we “win,” we may find that we have been reduced to our hatred. But if we focus on saving what we love, we are more likely to come out of the conflict without having become the very thing we despised.

I think all three of these quotations belong together. The first combines the gentleness that can be found in love with the fierceness we need to fight for what is right. The second again calls us to love, even when that love seems like a waste, as well as to live fully, which can be difficult to do if we don’t bring a certain ferocity to life. The third calls us to exercise the strength that can be found in love as we face the things that would challenge that love. If we can do that, I have no doubt we’ll make a difference in the lives of those around us.