It's All About the Journey

Today is your future. Live in the moment!

Monthly Archives: November 2014


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Now and Then

We don’t think of our lives as exciting and full of adventure while entering them this morning, today.  The drudgery of routine exists for us.  It is only in retrospect that we realize and recognize the adventure, the development of our intellect, our moral structure, our past challenges become experiences which we can categorize and learn from.  They become lofty ideals.

I was reading Emerson’s The American Scholar this morning, gleaning, as usual.  Something I’ve noticed about him, he tells us to put down the book, get outside, use nature and creation (and experiences of life) to visualize this wonderful world.  Only when you cannot, then dig out the books.

Today’s text:

The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, — with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, — remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.


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Brittany’s Choice

I read today about Brittany and her choice to take her life.  It saddened me, I thought, “I don’t think I could do that, I couldn’t pull the plug on my life.”  But as I read about her illness, her symptoms, and the slow way that she was dying and I have perhaps thought “better” of it.  After all, I’m not the one who was going through the pain.  And, I remember pain.  I remember being sick three years ago, I remember the psoriasis burning my skin so badly I could scarcely wear shoes, I couldn’t lay on my side, my thighs were so raw, and it hurt so very badly.  And yet, somehow my pain is diminished when I read about her pain.  Debilitating headaches, stroke like seizures.  And then there were those who thought that it was a terrible thing that she gave up “hope.”  Hope?  Living out her final days in debilitating pain, being hooked up to pain medications that keep you dopey enough to not mind the pain?  What kind of life is that?  (Not to mention the medical bills, but let’s not go there, please, not at this writing.)  Shame on them to take on the judgement seat, which is God’s alone, and God is a God of love, and I’ll bet anything that he received his loving child in arms of glory.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” has a sentence in it that I think is appropriate for this situation:

“Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Can a person that is not in pain, and not dying, truly relate to the person who is in pain and dying?

I realize that making a bold statement like this could cost me readers, it will cost me HUGE amounts of disdain from those that I love that are religious.  I’m not saying these things to cause dissension.  I’m saying this because no one knows the journey we each have to walk through.  Only the person going through it really knows.

Love and prayers to Brittany’s family.


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I had a dream…

We are nostalgic, I think, not for old times, but for old dreams.

–Robert Brault

Our dreams can be many things, but I tend to think that MY dreams are my subconscious, attempting to work out conflicting issues, or perhaps remembering an instance, whether it be good or bad, and working through it.  So I do not take them seriously as “signs.”

I enjoy my dreams, for the most part.  Once in awhile I enjoy leaving them.  Randomly I dream about haunted houses (spooky and I awaken frightened), seeing people that were dead and aren’t.  They are usually doing something, not looking at me, but I am looking at them.  Again, it’s my soul working it out.  Once I had this strange dream about a grandfather I’d never met.  I said, “I thought you were dead, that’s what everyone said.”  He just said, “I know, but I’m not.”  I found my grandmother and told her and said, “you said he was dead.”  She said, “I know…he’s not.”  (Makes you want to laugh, doesn’t it?)

I have read that we are the universe.  This is true to an extent, no one can experience the same thing we experience, their perspective is different, they are standing next to you, so they see everything from an entirely different point of view, even at those few feet.  So, we see things from our own perspective and make use (or dispose) of the experience in our life.

While this quote by Robert Brault is probably written with experiences in mind, I found it to be an answer to my random dreams.


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Oh the Wonder! Robert Brault

It’s all about attitude.  If you could trade lives with a happy person, they would be just as happy with yours.

This quote, and others, I have found at http://rbrault.blogspot.com/p/my-2014-top-forty.html.  He is an ideal writer of our day, and I highly recommend becoming a follower, especially when you need that little uplift in your day!