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7:22 A.M. - Monday, Jan. 24, 2005 I hope you too see the beauty in this message. No matter how many steps you have taken in life the massagers of life's footsteps are out there if you are willing to listen. Thanks, mom�I love and miss you too. Sandy "Good morning, I re read your last entry this morning. Just finished a book I found at the library. It is "The Impossible Just Takes A Little Longer" by Art Berg. One of the chapters has this poem written by a nineteenth-century Englishman named William Ernest Henley, who had been struck down in the prime of his life with a crippling disease. Left in a hospital and expected to die within weeks, he wrote a now-famous poem, which he titled "Invictus" {Out of the night, that covers me. Black as the Pit from Pole to pole, "Invictus is a Latin work that means "unconquered, unsubdued, and invincible." As it turned out the word perfectly fit William Henley. The doctors had been forced to amputate one leg just below the knee, and they told him days later that if he wanted to live, they would need to amputate the other leg. "No," said Henley, He was going to survive without that second operation, he proclaimed. And after eighteen long months, he did indeed walk away from that hospital, never to return. My point in sending you this poem is to impress on you that you can rise above any adversity, which you have already done all your life. You cannot control others, but you can control how you react and think when others are unfair and cruel. You can keep it in your mind and go over and over time after time and relive the hurts. On the other hand, you can, whenever it comes to mind, realize some people are stupid and self-seeking, and just love to make someone miserable, or too dumb to even think about how others might feel. That gives them power over you. You must have heard that the best way to get even with people like that is to be happy. They want you to be miserable with them. They want to drag you down to their level. I do not think forgiving is forgetting the people who have hurt you, it is forgetting the act that hurt you, and you can try in your mind to realize why they might have acted like that, excuse and forget it. Especially if it is a loved one. Sometimes when loved ones do not do things or do things that hurt they are afraid, maybe that they are growing old without much accomplishments and it is easier to be ill than to fail again. You with your creative mind can think of a million reasons people behave as they do. You could try to put yourself in others shoes and think how you might feel. I love you Sandy and always want your life to be full of joy and happiness. Happiness is work, you know, just keeping the hurtful feelings at bay. Your meditation should help. Art Berg, you can find online, he was in a terrible accident and is a quadriplegic. He had everything, good looks, money, and a wonderful girl who was going to be his wife. He was on a trip to see her to give her an engagement ring, was traveling with his friend and got sleepy, let his friend drive, the friend fell asleep at the wheel, and crashed. The friend was not badly injured, but Art was. One of the most moving things in this book was the friend going through hell when he found out how badly his friend was hurt. His emotional pain was as bad as Arts physical pain. And he is still Arts best friend. Art says, "I may be paralyzed physically, but I believe there are those of you here in this room today who may feel paralyzed, too." When you feel overwhelmed emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, or financially, when you are filled with a sense of uncertainty and doubt, unsure of the direction you should take, when your challenges seem bigger than your opportunities, then you can find yourself paralyzed-- and it is a paralysis that can be just as devastating as the physical paralysis was for me. I love you and miss you.
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