This is a reprint of an arti­cle I wrote a year ago. It’s about love. And in this sea­son of love and hope, we pray for mag­na­nim­ity of heart.

The word mag­nan­i­mous, really comes from two words: magna (or great) and anima (or spirit). When we are mag­nan­i­mous, we are asked to have a great spirit: A spirit of love. A spirit that is so much greater than the things that may hap­pen to us. A spirit that is able to pause, and see things from a greater, longer per­spec­tive. A spirit that does not have to win all the time. A spirit that can allow pain, and not be destroyed, but rather, made even stronger by it.

At the tail-end of this year, we take stock of our lives and ask our­selves some ques­tions that really matter.

I used to ask these types of ques­tions to my stu­dents. I call them “Ms. Uni­verse” ques­tions. They’re ques­tions that make us pause and think about life. They make us laugh and cry and stop and think more deeply. They make us eval­u­ate where life has gone, where it is at present and where it is head­ing. They are the ques­tions that really matter.

Pick up a jour­nal, set aside a few hours, and spend time with your­self answer­ing these ques­tions. Make it fun: treat your­self to a nice lunch or din­ner at a restau­rant you like, and write as you eat. By the time the check arrives, you’ll have more than a few new ideas about how to change your life or busi­ness for the better.

Some­one asked me that the other day, and we won’t get into the cul­tural dif­fer­ences that made the con­ver­sa­tion even more inter­est­ing, but rather I’d like to focus on the ques­tion and how I would answer it. In his book Beyond Civ­i­liza­tion, Daniel Quinn sums up what he sees as the dri­ving force behind civ­i­liza­tions fail­ure to curb it’s own destruc­tion like this:

Old minds think: if it didn’t work last year, let’s do MORE of it this year.

New minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do some­thing ELSE this year.

I’ve been hav­ing some emo moments lately, and in my effort to look for songs to accom­pany me, I found out about this great web­site. I call them “songs that cap­ture my state of mind.” And they are. We love music because it makes us remem­ber things of the past and it makes us feel about things hap­pen­ing to us at present.

The con­cept of Stereo Mood is sim­ple: Because behind every song is an emo­tion, so Stereo Mood has cre­ated a way to sug­gest songs that fol­low your feel­ings. Stere­o­mood is the “emo­tional inter­net radio”, pro­vid­ing music that best suits your mood and your activities.

Our life can be a wel­ter of dead­lines, to-do’s and events, so that it’s so hard to breath easy or take a step back and take stock of the things hap­pen­ing to us. But there are more impor­tant things in life than the urgent. The urgent allows us to get by on a day to day. But just doing the day to day makes us lose focus on the more long term and the more last­ing things.

This arti­cle is a good reminder that there are more long last­ing activ­i­ties that we need to do as well–for our peace of mind, for our wholis­tic growth, for the things we really love.