The Fundamental Priorities

Joan Borysenko is a political scientist, a psychologist, and the author of Inner Peace for Busy People: 52 Strategies for Transforming Your Life. She spends her life studying how people connect with each other and with the world around them. This study has helped her to understand the "bottom line," the fundamental qualities that go into making us human—even in the midst of the business of our daily lives.

"It doesn't sound very scientific or sexy to say that every human being has basic needs," she says. "We need a balanced diet. We need to be out in nature, in the sunlight, a certain amount of time every day. Everyone needs to move and exercise every day, even if it's a 10 minute walk around the block. Every human being needs touch; touch releases a growth hormone that restores your immune system. Deep conversation raises our serotonin level so that we feel comfortable in our skin and at home in the world. These are such basic things. And yet what happens when people get crazy busy? They forget these incredibly basic fundamentals.

"We all need to ask ourselves, 'What are the fundamental priorities in my life?' My friend Loretta Laroche wrote a book called Life is Not a Stress Rehearsal, in which she lists some epitaphs that might be written on a tombstone. One of my favorites is, 'Got it all done. Died anyway.' The things we do are not the fundamentals of life; it's the things we are. The fundamentals of life are kindness, caring, and compassion. No matter what else I'm doing, if I'm not listening to other people, if I'm so wrapped up in myself that I can't see others' pain then I am not being what I was meant to be. I might be writing a brilliant paper, but I'm not being a brilliant human being, because my own moral and ethical fundamentals have been undermined.

"Part of the problem is that we spend too much time looking for peace and happiness outside of ourselves. We think, 'If I get that job then I'll be happy. If I get that car, then I'll be happy.' We need to recognize that happiness is already inside us. We were born with everything we seek, but now that we're adults, we think we need to take workshops to try and figure it out. We have to recognize that we already have what we are seeking—a sense of inner peace. It is the most fundamentally precious thing that we own."

The wisest keeps something of the vision of a child. Though he may understand a thousand things that a child could not understand, he is always a beginner, close to the original meaning of life.

—John Macy,
author