You Are What You Think

September 4, 2013, 2013

There are few people that we meet in the course of our lives who leave a mark in our hearts giving us a shot of a must needed energy, and the opportunity to be able to connect and touch in the hope that when the hurdles of life come in front of us that person has the tool to spring over them without any difficulties.

I believe there are not coincidences in life and that every person we meet in life has a purpose, either to help us grow or make us stronger, but nonetheless it has a reason and it is our responsibility to find it and act upon it.

As we move into another phase of your life, I thought I’d share with all of you some inside as part of a discussion I’ve had with friends many times.

It is about thought and character, the aphorism, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of your life. You are literally what you think, your character being the complete sum of all your thoughts.

As the plant spring from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them. This applies equally to those acts called “spontaneous” and “unpremeditated” as to those, which are deliberately executed.

Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the

sweet and bitter fruitage of his own husbandry.

“Thought in the mind hath made us, What we are

By thought was wrought and built. If man’s mind

Hath evil thoughts, pain comes on him as comes

The wheel the ox behind….

…..If one endure

In purity of thought, joy follows him

As his own shadow – sure”

Only by searching and mining, are gold and diamonds obtained, and we can find every truth connected with our being, if we dig deep into the mine of our soul; and that we are the maker of our character, the molder of our lives, and the builder of our destiny, we may unerringly prove, if we will watch, control, and alter our thoughts, tracing their effects upon ourselves, upon others, and upon our lives and circumstances, linking cause and effect by patient practice and investigation, and utilizing our very experience, even to the most trivial, everyday occurrence, as a means of obtaining that knowledge of ourselves which is Understanding, Wisdom, Power. In this direction, as in no other, is the law absolute that “He that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened;” for only by patience, practice, and ceaseless importunity can a person enter the Door of the Temple of Knowledge.

We can be, do or have any thing we would want in life, and, what I am giving you today is just a small part of the foundation to build up upon it, never stop searching and asking, the soul attracts that which it secretly harbors; that which it loves, and also that which it fears; it reaches the height of its cherished aspirations; it falls to the level of its unchastened desires, - and circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its own. 

Power Of Words

One of our mightiest possessions is the word. Words have the power to build, to store and create, as well as tear down and destroy. We think with words, we organize our world with words. We communicate with words, we inform with words, we build relationships with words. Our worlds are very much limited by the words we use. Sometimes we become so caught up with words that we forget that they are just symbols for things, and we begin to see them as a substitute for the things they are meant to represent.

It's important to remind ourselves that words are just phonetic symbols put side by side. By themselves they're nothing. Most of the words we know were learned before we were six or seven years old, to early to fully analyze or understand them. These words were defined for us and we accepted them as presented. For example, if the significant people in our lives felt strong hate toward a particular person or thing, the words they taught us concerning these things became part of our attitude as well. The words soon represented a constellation of thoughts and feelings surrounding those things. Soon we found that were thinking and responding negatively to them. Of course, this couldn't be helped. Nevertheless, it was in this way that we learned what to hate or fear or avoid.

Just as we acquired the words for goodness, hope, optimism, joy and love, we ;earned also to attach negative symbols and discovered early the power of directing them we pleased. We found that words could hurt. As a child, I can remember the standard retort for words bullies: Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me! Occasionally this brought a rock or a stick my way, but it was more difficult not to feel the sting of such words as skinny freak, dumb retard. I wonder how many of us still feel the pain of labels that devastated us long ago.

Perhaps one of the great human tragedies is that few of us even stop to ask whether the words we think with and which cause us to fee so strongly are ours or simply echoes which continue to reverberate in our minds. If we stopped to redefine these words, we might discover that many of them are no longer relevant to the present. Words we learned as children may have prevented us from truly experiencing and understanding other persons or things as they really are. For many of us these words continue to serve in their capacity to reject, exclude and judge.

The great humanitarian-scientist, Buckminster Fuller, said that one of the most significant events of his life was when he stopped everything and wrote his own dictionary. He redefined words according to his experience, as what they represented in his reality, not that of others. This effect forced him to re-examined his values and reassess his attitudes. It gave him a far deeper appreciation of the power of words for the remainder of his life.

As adults we know that certain behavior is discarded early in life because it is childish and inappropriate. As wise adults we learn that certain words and labels should be discarded as well because they are hurtful or destructive, and if that means passing the opportunity to tell the latest joke, then we are all the more fortunate for that insight.

There can be no word large enough to encompass the wonder of a human being. To judge others by a single label is to miss them entirely. As a child I may have been a Latin immigrant, or skinny, or a number of things, but I was much more than each one of them. Thanks goodness for those special individuals who learned to look beyond the labels and to know me as a whole person. It's not surprising that they turned out to be the people most worth knowing.

Words so often desensitize us. They can paralyze our senses as well as our better instincts. Words are powerful things which too often take casually. They were created to help us give organization to chaos. But, unless we are careful, they become traps which lead us to apathy, hate and loneliness. we mustn't allow words to control us. They are our tools to enlarge, not narrow, our lives.

Story of an Aging Couple

This is a story of an aging couple
Told by their son who was President of NBC NEWS.*
This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading, and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes…
My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
“Oh, bull shit!” she said. “He hit a horse.”
“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.
My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.
So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)
He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St.. Augustin’s Church.
She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”
“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
“No left turns,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.
As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”
“What?” I said again.
“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.
“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”
But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.
“Loses count?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”
I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.
“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.
She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.
They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.
A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.
“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said..
“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day.
That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.
He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said:
“I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”
A short time later, he died.
I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.
I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life,
Or because he quit taking left turns. “
Life is too short to wake up with regrets.
So love the people who treat you right.
Forget about the one’s who don’t.
Believe everything happens for a reason.
If you get a chance, take it & if it changes your life, let it.
Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.”
Enjoy life, it has an expiration date

The Power Of Words

One of our mightiest possessions is the word. Words have the power to build, to store and create, as well as tear down and destroy. We think with words, we organize our world with words. We communicate with words, we inform with words, we build relationships with words. Our worlds are very much limited by the words we use. Sometimes we become so caught up with words that we forget that they are just symbols for things, and we begin to see them as a substitute for the things they are meant to represent.

It's important to remind ourselves that words are just phonetic symbols put side by side. By themselves they're nothing. Most of the words we know were learned before we were six or seven years old, to early to fully analyze or understand them. These words were defined for us and we accepted them as presented. For example, if the significant people in our lives felt strong hate toward a particular person or thing, the words they taught us concerning these things became part of our attitude as well. The words soon represented a constellation of thoughts and feelings surrounding those things. Soon we found that were thinking and responding negatively to them. Of course, this couldn't be helped. Nevertheless, it was in this way that we learned what to hate or fear or avoid.

Just as we acquired the words for goodness, hope, optimism, joy and love, we ;earned also to attach negative symbols and discovered early the power of directing them we pleased. We found that words could hurt. As a child, I can remember the standard retort for words bullies: Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me! Occasionally this brought a rock or a stick my way, but it was more difficult not to feel the sting of such words as skinny freak, dumb retard. I wonder how many of us still feel the pain of labels that devastated us long ago.

Perhaps one of the great human tragedies is that few of us even stop to ask whether the words we think with and which cause us to fee so strongly are ours or simply echoes which continue to reverberate in our minds. If we stopped to redefine these words, we might discover that many of them are no longer relevant to the present. Words we learned as children may have prevented us from truly experiencing and understanding other persons or things as they really are. For many of us these words continue to serve in their capacity to reject, exclude and judge.

The great humanitarian-scientist, Buckminster Fuller, said that one of the most significant events of his life was when he stopped everything and wrote his own dictionary. He redefined words according to his experience, as what they represented in his reality, not that of others. This effect forced him to re-examined his values and reassess his attitudes. I gave him a far deeper appreciation of the power of words for the remainder of his life.

As adults we know that certain behavior is discarded early in life because it is childish and inappropriate. As wise adults we learn that certain words and labels should be discarded as well because they are hurtful or destructive, and if that means passing the opportunity to tell the latest joke, then we are all the more fortunate for that insight.

There can be no word large enough to encompass the wonder of a human being. To judge others by a single label is to miss them entirely. As a child I may have been a Latin immigrant, or skinny, or a number of things, but I was much more than each one of them. Thanks goodness for those special individuals who learned to look beyond the labels and to know me as a whole person. It's not surprising that they turned out to be the people most worth knowing.

Words so often desensitize us. They can paralyze our senses as well as our better instincts. Words are powerful things which too often take casually. They were created to help us give organization to chaos. But, unless we are careful, they become traps which lead us to apathy, hate and loneliness. we mustn't allow words to control us. They are our tools to enlarge, not narrow, our lives.

Passion for a Better World

Too often our sensibilities are assaulted and bludgeoned by all that seems bad in the world - the T.V. bulletins of the day's horrors, the full, graphic story we get by watching the eleven o'clock news.

Why do we allow ugliness to assume such overriding importance in our lives? If we don't cast it out with determination, it will surely blind us to all the bright reality around us. If only we could step out of our perceptual traps and see that beauty and goodness comprise at least an equal part of what there is. What a miracle would unfold in this world of negativity if we all subscribed to this one simple idea!

What would be do without our dreams? how would we get through even one day without them?

Of course, I'm told that healthy individuals face reality head on, that to live with illusions is a very dangerous thing, that the world is a serious business and doesn't have room for dreamers. Well, I don't believe it. it's not a problem as long as we know the difference between illusion and dellusion.

for many of us, reality can frequently be a bit too real. In fact, we are often tossed about y the whims of an incomprehensible, often cruel reality. We may be forced to face poverty, danger, illness, impending death, lack of love, loneliness-the list seems endless. Illusions can be great help in handling these situations.

All of us live with illusions. They abound in places like Atlantic City or Las Vegas. I'm not referring to professional or compulsive gamblers, just the thousands of individuals sitting hopefully, hour after hour, at the one-armed-bandits, dreaming of hitting the jackpot. We know full well that the odds are against us, but we're sure the prize is just one more nickel, dime, quarter or dollar away. When asked why we do it, we say that it's just a form of recreation, that gambling is fun. But in the back of our minds is the newspaper story about the person who last year hit the million dollars jackpot. So we stay in the noisy, sometimes smoky room and try to stick it out. No real harm done-in fact, we are quite ready to do the same on our next visit.

It is often the hope of finding that certain someone that keeps the single people going to special bars, church socials, community events. Without these activities, which suggest that someone may be waiting at the very next turn, they might never break free from their past. That kind of illusion can't be too wrong.

I have a good friend who has a terminal illness. Not long ago she was told that his condition would worsen progressively. She had a dream, not a delusion, that getting back to his friends, family, job and old lifestyle would give him the additional moment he needed for life. So far he's been right, much to the amazement of his physicians.

I can't even imagine a world without those dreamers who have the feeling that things will be better tomorrow. With that feeling comes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and causes us to work actively to make things better.

I'm not suggesting that we all start living an illusion, but it's an interested psychological finding that one hundred per cent realists are often among the most depressed person in society. I'll take healthy illusions any day. If our dreams cause us to become active seekers and partakers of life, setting up the necessary contingencies for making things happen, than they can be positive forces which are conductive to happiness and growth.

We might learn a lesson from Snow White. She dreamed that someday her Prince would come. But in the meantime, in place of moping around, she had a good life with the Seven Dwarf!

Self Respect

William James once wrote, "probably a crab would be filled with a personal sense of outrage if it could hear us class it without apology, as a crustacean, and thus dismiss it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say;'I am myself, myself alone'."

The human spirit is such that it will defy every effort to lump it into categories, whether it is done for convenience or by design. It is our very uniqueness, our individual identity that transcends our short existence here and therefore must always be preserved.

One of the most difficult things for the human mind to comprehend is that life moves on even though many of us don't seem to be fully aware of it. This lack of consciousness is often responsible for causing many of us to waste a great portion of our lives. We lose much of our childhood, our adolescence, our adulthood, our middle age, simply because we spend so much time living in the future. The tragedy is that what is lost is gone forever. None of us has been able to relive the past or change our transgressions.

Most of us live for tomorrow. We have convinced ourselves that it will be better, that we will be richer, wiser and more secure. This may be pleasant to contemplate, but also costly if it means losing even a moment of our present.

I know we are brought up to work hard, to save our money and invest in the future. in this way, we're told, someday we will be able to enjoy what we dream about. The sad part is that too often by the time we reach those golden years, we no longer need the same things or we're too tired, too ill, too set in our ways to enjoy them.

How many trips have we postponed until some indefinite time, only because they seemed too strenuous or stressful? how many possibilities of happiness have we missed because we waited for a more convenient moment? how many people have we failed to celebrate because we thought we'd have them forever?

Recently at a cafeteria I sat at the counter next to a man, who appeared to have been crying, his sadness was obvious, written all over his face, so I broke a conversation with him and he immediately started letting out his frustration, his anger, his pain and his sorrow, he told me that his wife, who had recently passed away, wanted to visit her relatives in Scotland, the country of her parents' birth. It was her only wish. Though they could certainly afford to go, this man thought it was a rather frivolous way to spend money. There was always a less expensive place to go, the mortgage to be paid, the need for a new lawn mower or plans for the children's education.

Now the house is paid for, has his new lawn mower, the children have all been educated and are married and on their own. His wife's special dream was never realized. She died few months ago. He's alone with his accumulated things. it pained me to hear him lament, "I wish I had....," as we so often do in hindsight.

I am not suggesting that we should be spendthrifts of completely self-indulgent, or that we fail to plan sensibly for our future. I'm simply saying that we all have present needs and that too often they become permanent gaps in our lives when they are not realized. We all need a little frivolity and self-indulgence from time to time.

Though frowned upon in our culture, pampering ourselves now and then seems to me a healthful thing. Why should it cause us to feel a sense of selfishness and guilt, specially when these feelings take all the fun out of it? We all know the joy of buying that expensive pair of shoes we love so much, or having dinner in that elegant restaurant we read about, or sending flowers or gifts for no reason other than the special joy it will bring to someone.

It's sad to hear things such as -
"People only send me flowers when I'm ill, or in a hospital when I'm too distracted to enjoy them. And how sad that the day I recieve the most flowers i won't even see them. Who needs flowers after you're dead? I get presents on my birthday or the usual holidays, but I'd  forego these for a surprise gift sometime-just a sign that someone is thinking about me when they don't really have to."

"We should have taken that trip last year. Now he/she is in the hospital and we may never be able to do it."

"I should have told her i loved her while she was still here."

To pass up or ignore the possibilities of present laughter, to fill our lives with plans for some nebulous tomorrow, is to court the possibility of permanent, irreparable loss. Time is limited, even for the youngest of us. It is something we can control and enhance with our expressions of love and caring now. Such opportunities come only so often in a lifetime. To suggest that we all have a right to be pampered now and again without the usual accompanying feeling of guilt is not asking too much.

We often spend our lifetime doing the sensible thing, mostly for the welfare of others. Common sense, self-denial, prudence _these things certainly have their place as long as they don't become constants in our life. We all need frequent doses of "I deserve this." Aside from what immediate happiness it brings to us, it is also a basic reminder that "I like me and I'm worth it."

A Passion for Celebration

Life is meant to be a celebration! It shouldn't be necessary to set aside special times to remind us of this fact. Wise is the person who finds a reason to make everyday a special one.

Traditionally the start of every new year is a time for letting go of the past, wiping the slate clean and renewing our hope in a future, both immediate and distant. We are of course most receptive to anything that strengthens our faith in tomorrow. After all, that's where we will spend the reminder of our lives. Our tradition of forward thinking also include a vision of a better life for generations yet to come.

So for the sake of continuity and posterity we invest the future with our best intentions. We try to remain hopeful for tomorrow's children and their children. But we are continually reminded from many sides of dark clouds on the horizon. Hope and apprehension for the future are for ever a running battle. We are told that the future will not be a very nice place in which to live; but a different impulse tells us that where there is life there is still hope.

I've often thought that we allow our past to speak too loudly in its implications for our future. Though very often accused of being too optimistic and even characterized  by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything, I am always more willing to look for positive signs than for inexorable doom.

There's a lot of pessimism out there and I'm not buying in. In fact, I'm sick of it. It's hard for me to understand people who say things like, "I'm not bringing a child into this troubled world"; or, " Better we should end it and start all over again."


From my vantage point, the world still has just as much chance at Utopia as it does for Armageddon. Besides, like William Faulkner, if I must choose between a life of pain and suffering and no life at all, I'll take the pain and suffering anytime. No matter how miserable people tell me that existence is for us, I'll never be without hope. I haven't learned how to lose it yet.

When I so often say that we all have unlimited potential, I mean exactly that. I feel certain that the most stunning novel is yet to be written, the most awesome building has yet to be built, the greatest symphony is yet to be composed, the tastiest desert is yet to be dreamed of. There are planets and stars to be investigated and visited - a whole, as yet undiscovered, universe will continue to stagger the imaginations of a thousand more generations. There are breakthroughs still to be accomplished in virtually every field of human endeavor.

From my perspective, I plan to learn from the past and not suffer because of it. Like many before me, I see a renaissance just ahead and I want to be part of it. It's only natural that I wish to join those whose main purpose is to pass along to another generation the accumulated knowledge and inspiration of the past.

It's really not a lot to ask. We have witnessed so many fantastic things and we know with our hearts and our minds that miracles do happen. I ask only that we believe in the simple proposition that it is continued hope which sustains life. And hope arises from the knowledge that we are living in a time of abundant new beginnings. That's cause enough for celebration.

Happy and Prosperous New Year 2011 to all !

Doing the Right Thing

Wiston Churchill said “To every man there comes that special moment when he is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a special thing unique to him and fitted to his special talent. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared or unqualified for the work which would be his finest hour”.

Is this a normal year for you? Or is it different as it should be? Does it always take something outside of our control to put us back in control? The proven answer is yes. My question is why? Are all the changes within the market place trying to tell you something that you’ve forgotten? Are these uncertain times trying to remind you of the power that allows you to see the meaning of your life? Or are these just confusing times and somebody’s else problem. Do we just brush these times off as something that will not really change our lives? I believe that times like these come only once or twice in a lifetime at a level that forces you to pay attention. If you embrace the lessons learned during times like these and make your new choices a part of your daily habits, you could save all the things that matter in life before it’s too late. Now is the time to be good, not average. Good people always appreciate what they have before they lose it; average people can only appreciate what they have after they lose it.

We all have a choice in the way we live our lives. But many times, you don’t discover whether your choices make a good life or an average one until the moment when a situation seems to find a voice and taps you in the shoulder. The problem isn’t that you couldn’t hear and see; it’s that you wouldn’t listen and understand. The real question is why is this happening now? Is it a wake up call that you have asked or hoped for because of the direction you’ve gone in your life? I believe it is! Be thankful that it has called on you, because if you are truly thankful during these uncertain times, you will be reminded of the meaning that you truly have in life.

Let’s be honest…..why has this finally happened? Is it because you have lost control or have doubts? No, it is because you realize you are not totally in control and you need help. At that moment, you realize that the things that don’t matter really don’t matter anymore. What matters most is doing the right thing. Nothing changes until you change, and once you change, your life become different for you and those depending on you. I clearly understand that what is going on in the economy today has affected us all. The key is not to be angry about things like a 401(k) (I call mine 101(k) today!).

Security is important, but the Good Life is more important. I truly believe things happen for a reason, and my hope and prayer is that everyone find within their heart to find the purpose and meaning of their lives and move forward living the good live, Doing the Right Thing. I have learned through these times that life is too short not to be happy, and life is too long not to be successful.