Good people have time

Duško Radović–I quote him a lot. He was quite a genius with words. I’m not sure what exactly he meant when he coined the phrase in the title of this blog, I know what it means to me, especially with the added sentence:

Good people have time. That’s the first virtue of goodness.

As much as I need time to do good, I need to be good to have time. Good to myself, good to others.

Being good is not a luxury. It’s an essential human trait. That’s how we developed as a species and as a civilization.

Yesterday I was good. I took half an hour in the morning to prepare the dough for pizza. Later I revisited the dough a couple of times to knead it and let it rise again. I picked some vegetables in the garden, cut them and arranged them in small bowls.

I brought and cut the wood, cleaned the pizza oven, started the fire to warm it up. I sat in front of the oven for two hours baking pizzas while others relished eating them fresh and hot.

Today being good means sharing with you my 10 favorite quotes of Duško Radović (including the one I began with). Please, take your time to take them in!

The warm-up quote is relevant for the situation we’re in right now: waiting for the lockdown to end. We can be hopeful, but we don’t know what the future will look like and when it will come. Duško gives us at least something to look forward to…

New Year will, understandably, come even for those who aren’t waiting for it. Well, the magic is in the waiting, not in the New Year. It’s nice to wait for something when you can be sure it will come. We waited in our lives for many things, we all know that, but what came always and without fail were only New Years.

The next three quotes are about love. I hope they will remind you, love is a verb, not a noun…

There’s so little love among people. Those who know how to love shouldn’t be doing anything else.

When the going gets tough then the tough get–loving. Let us be reminded of the appreciation of tough times; such appreciation often comes only in hindsight. I hope you went through something like this sometime in your life…

This if favorable for love: little time, uncomfortable places, anxiety, a set of aggravating circumstances. That’s when love is beautiful, that’s when it blossoms. The more time and space and other conveniences you give to love the more it loses charm. People never hate each other as much as in large, well furnished, and heated flats.

Don’t take this literally, please! You can love each other in a nice flat. But also notice how burdensome possessions can be. Notice the distance they create. As soon as that happens, don’t wait until it’s too late. Remember those magical loving moments in uncomfortable places and add to it this picture…

No image is as beautiful as two heads on one pillow. It’s beautiful even if they found each other on one pillow because they didn’t have another. Every trouble that connects us is good, and every convenience that separates us is bad.

Being locked down together doesn’t necessarily connect people. It can lead to dissatisfaction and irritation. The next three quotes go from love to life’s choices. You often have more choice than you think…

Let’s fight for dignity and a high standard of our dissatisfaction. It’s a shame what people can be dissatisfied with.

When you’re dissatisfied, you go on complaining about it. So much energy gets wasted on futile grumbling and not listening to those who might hold the answers…

Speak as much as you like but still, before making decisions ask those who are silent.

To do this you need to be modest. Modesty can be invisible, it doesn’t make you stand out. But in the eyes of your friends, it definitely does…

To have friends means accepting that there are nicer, smarter and better people than you. If you can’t accept that, you don’t have friends.

It’s hard to argue, of course, what means “accepting”. The agreement doesn’t take place just because you want it. With the pandemic, you may agree with your friends or you may not. This is a witty Radovic’s observation of why that is so…