The Virtues Project

i think i'd be much more able to be present for this community now than i was two years ago. which is sort of a cool thing to realize. i could be wrong, but i feel like i'm more open to virtues and less likely to watch each week go by as i sadly resign myself to not finding (contentedness/acceptance/joy/etc). also, i want to try to approach this by noticing the way in which a certain virtue is part of my life, already, as much as i want to try to force/coax more in.

so is anyone out there? would you be interested in participating again? i could try to do polls like pthalogreen used to, and i could probably scare up some more members from my friends list. is there anything you'd like to change from the way we did this in 2004? would you prefer virtues to last 2 weeks instead of one, or to have writing prompts/projects each week, or... something else?

Moderation was a weekly virtue a couple of weeks ago. I didn't have time to post this then, but here's what I wrote.

"It was a good week of moderation, and I have balanced it well, I think. I have fixed my sleeping patterns, I go to sleep at 11 or 11:30 and I have an alarm waking me at a quarter to 9. Moderation allowed me to acomplish much more, because I didn’t spend a lot of time on any one thing, but rather changed activities. I prayed, cleaned, cooked, read, went online to do some stuff, spent time with family, exercised, went for walks... I don't spend so much time online anymore, and it has its pluses. I have more time for all of these things, and I like it. "

Hmm, for this week, I just have a collection of pretty writings that I'd like to post. Nothing in particular is going on where I could show peacefulness. I'm peaceful, but when nothing is going on, you just take it for granted, kind of. If you know what I mean...

Psalm 23 best expresses peace and how it stems from trust in God. It’s beautiful, and recently I decided to commit it to my memory.

( Psalm 23Collapse )

God is good. He is always with me, and nothing is going to happen to me that He and I together can’t handle. No matter how bleak things may seem sometimes, He’s there, to support, protect and comfort. I can trust Him. I like this poem called ‘Footprints’… As many times as I read it, it never fails to send shivers down my back and calm me.

( FootprintsCollapse )

Finally I’d also like to share this prayer of St. Francis, because it contains a phrase “make me the instrument of your peace”.

( Prayer of St. FrancisCollapse )


Hope this week is going on well for you all. Peace!

Edit: Oh, and I forgot I had a "peace" icon:

Many people think of peace as the absence of conflict and trouble and distress. Unfortunately, this way of looking at things means that you have to wait for peace to come to you. You have to wait for that one moment in your life when everything's going right and nothing's exploding. In practice, this doesn't happen very often.

I saw a painting once, or maybe I just heard about it :p, where there was a waterfall in the forest and storm clouds in the sky and rain and right at the top of the waterfall in a small tree-type-thing there was a bird's nest and a bird and the point of the painting was peace, and being okay in your surroundings even when things are stormy.

Peacefulness is accepting the situations you can't change, and making do with what you've got. It's realising that you can still have a good day when things go wrong if you change your attitude.

Peace comes from treating others as you'd want to be treated, even when they don't deserve it.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
- Matthew 5:9

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.
- Albert Schweitzer

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
- James Levin

The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.
- James Allen

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.
- Buddha

sorry I'm late with this, guys, i wasn't home at all from last friday until monday sometime and by monday it felt too late to post a poll. :/

Hi! This word co-operation made me think of the story of Babel tower, because it shows how co-operation is necessary to do anything, and if people don't undertsnad each other they cannot achieve a thing. Well, my step-dad has purchased a Bowflex (a sort of a machine on which you do all sorts of exercises and you can slect the resistance) recently and together we were asembling it. I really liked that, and I think it helped that we were working together. I was mostly looking up the parts necessary for each step and he put them together, sometimes I would help with instructions when they were confusing, we'd both look and try to figure out what the proper way to do it was. It was nice, together we figured it out and then tested it out. It would most likely take Dan twice the time to do it on his own...

I had some stuff written down about moderation too, but didn't have time to post it. I'll do that later.

After my last post, I aimed to have a personal success with cooperation. Here I'll outline the major unsuccessful event and the major type of successes I've had in the last few days.

Usually I have problems with being too silent, self-contained, and uncooperative - especially if I disagree. So, I tried to be more vocal when the situation called for it.

I practiced this in a study group a few days ago, but I think I was a little too vocal (oops!). No-one was particularly offended in the end, but I did interrupt people a little too much. No real success there, but I tried to be more cooperative by being more involved.

These last couple days, I admit I wasn't thinking very consciously about Cooperation until I would notice it after the act. But what I did do was make myself more available (physically and emotionally) for helping others on homework, and to a lesser extent for getting help myself. By doing so, I and the others benefited because we could fill in for each others' weaknesses in knowledge or skill.

Yay =)

~Odyssey

I have just spent several hours adding every memory in this community into memory categories: http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=virtues_project

Thanks, nevers for the idea!

The way I handled polls was, if I posted about the virtue of the previous week "so co-operation's doing well blahblahblah have a poll for next week" I memorified it under +Polls, the memory category for the previous week [Co-operation] and the memory category for what won the next week's poll. Otherwise, I just put it under the category of +Polls and the category that wont he next poll.

Cooperation is the way to combine the abilities of more than one person to some common purpose. This unity of purpose could be to solve some problem, achieve some level of understanding, to create something of beauty, or just to survive. Ant colonies, for example, are divided into "castes" of ants that serve different functions, but that are all helpful or necessary for survival and continuation of their species. Cooperation also implies that each individual is satisfying some desire of their own (see pthalogreen's post), be it desire for survival or something more complex.

If each person believes strongly enough in how the purpose of the group benefits him/herself, everyone in the group can become motivated, and this way the group can flourish - I think.

I aim to have a "personal victory" with Cooperation within a couple days, and assuming that happens, I'll report it =)

~Odyssey