The good life is built with good relationships.
Interpretation
A fulfilling life is largely dependent on the quality of our relationships with others.
This quote by Robert J. Waldinger emphasizes that the key to a satisfying and meaningful life lies in the strength and quality of our connections with other people. It suggests that nurturing these relationships can lead to greater happiness and fulfillment, highlighting the importance of community and love in personal development.
In practice
During a speech about community engagement, I shared Waldinger's quote to highlight the importance of building relationships.
Being human means there's a wall-builder in each of us. Our minds naturally divide the world into me and not-me, us and them. For thousands of years, our sages have taught that we're all one, yet we still divide wherever we look.
It's the quality of your relationships that matters.
It's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship. It's the quality of your close relationships that matters.
It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.
Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.
Men take on the nature and the habits and the power of thought of those with whom they associate in a spirit of sympathy and harmony.
If we don't know how to be alone, we'll only know how to be lonely.
She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.
But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity.
Never say that marriage has more of joy than pain.
It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
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