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Helping ourselves and helping others. How do we help the people we most want to help?

How do we help the people we most want to help? Helping others and helping ourselves.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone. Ronald Reagan

My son asked me to go for a walk the other evening. One of the questions he asked me was, “How do I help and encourage the people I want to help and encourage?”

Didn’t we all grow up hearing, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink?” There are examples all around us of people trying to motivate those that can’t seem to be motivated. We are sure their lives could be so much better if?

The first thing we all need to do is deal with the person in the mirror. That is the person we need to work on, that is the person we need to fix. By fixing ourselves we can become an example of someone that went from here to there. We become an example of an action that can be taken and results that can come from that action.

If we really want to try and help people we need to listen to them and understand them. When we listen to people we may learn that our dream for them isn’t anything like their dream for themselves. Maybe part of the problem is they don’t feel accepted for who they are. Maybe all our encouragement to be someone or something they are not is making them feel less accepted instead of more accepted.

We might find people don’t want to be our fixer-upper project. One of the easiest ways to turn a friend into an enemy is by offering them advice they don’t want to hear. Sometimes even though people need help we are not the help that they need and we are getting in the way of them getting the help that would benefit them.

One of the hardest things we may do is accept people how they are. It is what we need to do if we want to be friends. If they ask for advice we should give it but we shouldn’t be giving unsolicited advice, it is rarely appreciated. We need to take the attitude, I’m okay and you are okay. I will work on what I think I need to work on and you will work on what you think you need to work on. If you want my help you will ask for it, and if I can I will give you that help. If I can’t give you the help you need it is best if you find someone that can.

Help others achieve their dreams and you will achieve yours. Les Brown

If we really want to help people we need to find a way to encourage them to help themselves. I’m looking at a blog on helping the poor and the author says, “Charities can accept an apple from one man, and give it to another, Capitalism plants apple trees.”

Is teaching people to fish how we can help people? How do we do this in our families, communities, cities, countries, and world? If we start trying to help people to do something the person we most wanted to help may say, “Can you teach me how to do that?” All the cajoling in the world wouldn’t get them to that place but seeing other people accomplish something and believing they can accomplish it too, might be what lights a fire under them.

When we see other people doing things we want to do it makes us believe we also can accomplish it. When opportunities present themselves we can avail ourselves of, we may step up. If we take advantage of opportunities and turn those opportunities into something tangible, someone else will see they too can turn something, into something more.

Is being the best person we can be, and helping others to help themselves, the best way to impact the people around us?

Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others. Unknown

There is no use whatever trying to help people who do not help themselves. You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he be willing to climb himself. Andrew Carnegie

It is no kindness to treat unhappy people as helpless, hopeless, or inadequate, no matter what has happened to them. Kindness is having faith in the truth and that people can handle it and use it for their benefit. True compassion is helping people help themselves. William Glasser

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Unhealthy Helping: A Psychological Guide to Overcoming Codependence, Enabling, and Other Dysfunctional Giving Paperback – May 16 2016

by Shawn Meghan Burn PhD (Author)

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Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? Paperback – Large Print, Aug. 29 2020

by Belynda Wilson Thomas  (Author)5.0 out of 5 stars 2 ratings

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Trust our self and trust others. Control our self; we are the only people we can control.

Control our self; we are the only people we can control. Trust our self and trust others.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Trust yourself; you will start to trust others. Santosh Kalwar

It’s raining this morning as I put my little dog outside. She hates going out in the rain but that is part of a dog’s life. We all have things in our life that we don’t like but we still have to do.

Maybe we think we have to do things but we really don’t. We only have to be willing to live with the consequences of not doing them. When we look at hoarders on some of these shows we can see what the consequence of letting our house get out of control is.

When we don’t exercise we know it is harder to move and feel free in our bodies. Even a couple of days of not doing my sun salutations in the morning and I begin to feel it. Mom does morning exercises and goes for a walk almost every day, it is probably one of the reasons she is doing well at 95.

Haven’t we all heard count your pennies and the dollars look after themselves? There comes a time in our life when we know we may not be able to make more money through working and we will be dependent on what we have squirreled away and pensions we are part of. The earlier we started putting money away the better.

Sometimes we know we haven’t done what we should have done, and we think it’s too late. We need to be discerning in our lives about what we can do to improve it. Where would we like to put our time and energy? What results would we like to see? The biggest thing we often see is the improvements someone else could make that would make our life better and telling them to make those improvements is rarely positive or helpful.

The parents of politics are lack of control and seeking to control. The parents of leadership are influence and trust. Richie Norton

The only person we can control is our self, but often we are full of good advice and suggestions for others. It is so much easier to see the improvements that could be made in someone else’s life instead of our own. I am guilty of this and I cringe at some of the suggestions I have given out that no one wanted to hear. Most of us know how we could improve our lives even if we aren’t digging deep enough to find the courage and strength to improve them.

Criticizing and controlling others doesn’t work, but when we back off and leave others free to make their own choices they may make better choices. We may not even be aware we are controlling or trying to control other people. When we want people to be different than what they are, and if we have an image we want them to live up to we are said to be controlling.

Herein lies the rub. Don’t we all want people to live up to an image we have of them? The problem seems to be when we try to get other people to live up to our image of them, instead of working on ourselves to live up to the image we have of who we could be.  

If we work on ourselves and try to become the people we know we can be then we might be so busy we let other people work on themselves. When we know we are doing the best we can, maybe we will also trust others are doing the best they can. If we all do this and learn to have faith in others we may build better families, communities, and societies.

The more we trust ourselves to be the person we are to be, that we will act honestly and trustworthily, maybe we will then trust others to do the same. When we live in high trust societies everything is better for everyone. When we live in a high trust society we expect others to do the right thing because we do the right thing.

How do we build trust and not be taken advantage of because of that trust? We hear of scammers taking advantage of high trust people. Even in high trust societies, we have to beware of that which is “too good to be true,” because it rarely is. When something presents itself as “too good to be true” there is something we aren’t seeing. Scammers get us with the promise of something that is “too good to be true.”

Are we a low trust or a high trust person? Are we working on controlling ourselves or on controlling others?

Behind every young child who believes in himself is a parent who believed first. Unknown

It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them more successful human beings. Ann Landers

Self-trust is the first secret of success. Ralph Waldo Emmerson

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The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey (2006-08-01) Paperback – Jan. 1 1702

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Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? Paperback – Large Print, Aug. 29 2020

by Belynda Wilson Thomas  (Author)

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The compound effect is working in your life. Is it working for you or against you?

The compound effect is working in our life. Is it working against us or for us?

Small, smart choices + consistency + time = radical difference. Darren Hardy

Tonight our Toastmasters Theme is “Looking Forward” where do we see ourselves in five years. It’s a good question and as I am the one introducing the speakers I had to give an answer to be used in my introduction.

In five years I would like to be a Grandma, have more novels published, and have a line of children’s books written, illustrated, and published. I’m beginning to make audacious goals, for too many years I wasn’t willing to commit to any goals at all. What I’ve finally started doing is tracking my progress. In “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy, he says decisions shape our destiny and the effects of our decisions compound.

We’ve all heard if we set aside a little money in our youth and watch it grow through compound interest it will outgrow larger savings at an older age. Our habits compound, if we eat 100 calories more than we burn off every day of our life it will compound into something we aren’t likely to be happy with. If we instead do a little exercise every day of our life that will compound to something we will be happy with.

It seems in life there is no standing still. Although I have a plant in my house that looks like it defies that principle. It has been with me for over thirty years and somehow it never seems to grow. It is growing just enough to keep living and because of its slow growth, it hasn’t outgrown my house.

Since going the route of an Indie Author I’m not waiting for a publisher to tell me if I will be published, or the sales weren’t good enough on my first book so they won’t publish my subsequent books. All I need to do is produce the work, make it as good as I can, and put it out into the world. Where it goes once it is in the world isn’t up to me, at least not entirely.

It’s not the big things that add up in the end; it’s the hundreds of thousands or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary. Darren Hardy

This blog has been going for over two years and its reach has grown but not to anything huge. But, I’ve never had one day where no one read anything on my blog, and to me, that’s quite a big thing. The biggest fear starting out was will anyone read this? I’ve noticed the compounding effect of views over the two years. My monthly views are higher over time. Often we want to see results quicker and slow and steady isn’t good enough. Slow and steady will take us places we can’t imagine if we keep it up.

Remember the experiment with the glass of water where we keep doubling the amount of water and the glass is only half full when the next time it doubles it is full to overflowing. This is one of the reasons we get disheartened when we are watching the small imperceptible growth of one drop becoming two drops, and two drops becoming four until eventually, one half becomes full. Often we give up before we started seeing results thinking it will never become anything at this rate, but because we quit we don’t know what it could have become.

Most bloggers I am told quit at around nine months and after nine months for most people, it hasn’t grown into that much. If we are trying to make a quick buck blogging or writing it is not the way to do it. Most people would make more money working part-time at Wal-Mart than they will from writing their first book. If they keep at it the magic starts to happen and they may end up with something that working at Wal-Mart part-time could never achieve.

Too often we sabotage ourselves by not getting what we want to do, done. We talk ourselves out of it because it’s easier not to do it and we don’t have to risk failure. But, we can’t risk success if we aren’t willing to face failure. Those who do well in life often get the attitude to fail bigger, fail better.

Life is funny and now that I am here at this stage in my life I am realizing I am a late bloomer. It is very satisfying to be here. My children are grown and taking their place so my writing does not take away time and attention from them. I think having an interest is good for my marriage. It’s certainly good for me.

We can rest assured the compound effect is working in our lives. Is it working in a way we are happy with?

The complete formula for getting lucky: Preparation (personal growth) + attitude (belief mindset) + opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + action (doing something about it) = luck. Darren Hardy

A daily routine built on good habits and discipline separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful. Darren Hardy

The real cost of a four-dollar-a-day coffee habit over 20 years is $51,833.79. That’s the power of The Compound Effect. Darren Hardy

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The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success Hardcover – Sept. 15 2020

by Darren Hardy (Author)4.7 out of 5 stars 1,135 ratings

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Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? Paperback – Large Print, Aug. 29 2020

by Belynda Wilson Thomas (Author)5.0 out of 5 stars 2 ratings

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Change is always coming. We need to adapt, regroup, and know if we need to hold on or let go.

We need to adapt, regroup, and know if we need to hold on or let go. Change is always coming.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

One of the happiest moments in life is when you find the courage to let go of what you cannot change. Unknown

Waiting for change can be painful an advertisement says, as a violin is played very badly. The change can be music to your ears it says, as a beautiful violin piece is then played.

Many times in our lives we are waiting for better and we don’t know how we will handle getting from here to there. How many of us had awful nausea in pregnancy – that got better and produced our children which will produce our grandchildren.

How many awful jobs got better or were replaced and a better life was built, sometimes because we said we are never doing that again. We will not live like that. A horrible early life is jet-fuel for some people as they make sure they aren’t living the life they grew up in and nor will their children.

Sometimes we are going through tough parts of our life that we need to get through and we don’t know how things will look on the other side. We might not even know if there is another side, or if our life will have to be completely transformed. My mother always tells me, “There’s no use worrying about it.” She’s right, what does worrying today about what we’ll have to face tomorrow do except ruin today. Tomorrow, whatever it is will be there tomorrow and we will have to face it.

Today is all we have and if today is good we should enjoy it. Today is the day we can laugh with our children, if they are young we can read them a story or sing them a song, take them to a park, roll in the leaves, laugh and be joyful. If they aren’t young we can sit around a table and eat dinner and talk, go for a walk and talk, or call them on the phone and talk. Talking is a big part of connecting with people but not all people are talkers. Some people connect with the shoulder to shoulder connection of doing something together.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. Henry Ellis

Building loving families is one of the things we can do regardless of what is going on in the wider world. We don’t need good circumstances to build loving families and good communities.  We don’t need to live through easy times. When we go through the tough times in life we may pull together more and make more of an effort to make sure there is something for everyone, and that everyone is included.

Robert Schuller always said, “Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.” We need to be tough people and we need to let other people be tough people. They need to make their own decisions and carve their own path. It is not wrong for people to look after their own interests, in fact, it is required and if we don’t look after our own interests we can’t have a good life. It is not right to think anyone else will or should put our interests first.

When we have a family and we think of the family first it is usually good for everyone in the family. We can’t control our families we need to let them grow and develop and take their place in the world. We need to grow and develop so we are not left empty when they are ready to go out into the world.

Do we know when to hold on and when to let go?

Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don’t. Steve Maraboli

Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it. Alyson Noel

The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence. Denis Waitley

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 12 Powerful Tools for Leadership, Coaching, and Life Paperback – Jan. 11 2016

by Marilee Adams Ph.D. (Author), Marshall Goldsmith (Foreword)4.5 out of 5 stars 260 ratings

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Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? Paperback – Large Print, Aug. 29 2020

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Duplessis Orphans a story everyone should know. Money was the root of this evil.

Money was the root of this evil. Duplessis Orphans a story everyone should know.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

God see’s all, so we don’t have to be the ones to judge. Sister Augustine

I finished reading the book club pick early this month. What a choice, “The Home for Unwanted Girls” by Joanna Goodman. This is a story about a little known dark part of Canadian history. In 1955 when it was more profitable to look after children with mental challenges, orphanages had a “Change of Vocation” and became mental institutions.

Truth is stranger than fiction and fiction is the lie that tells a truth. I have found out disturbing truths about what has gone on in the world through fiction that I didn’t glean out of history books, newspapers, and magazine articles.

I found a magazine article by Conrad Black written for The National Post on June 30, 2016, about this dark period. “The chief characteristic of this era has been the same personnel teaching the same curriculum and caring for the hospitalized in the same edifices at 10 and then 20 times the cost to the taxpayers.”

Forgiveness is not easy. By design, it’s not meant to be easy. If it were, it would have little meaning. Yet, it’s one of the greatest gifts in this world that we can give to one another, and ourselves. Sister Augustine

Everything he says in that excerpt is true from what I can ascertain, but just like fiction is the lie that tells a truth, sometimes it seems we can use the truth to tell a lie. It isn’t even a lie of omission. It minimizes it to only a financial misdemeanor. This is how history is whitewashed so we don’t know what, “The same personnel teaching the same curriculum and caring for the hospitalized” means. It is such an innocuous sentence that doesn’t tell the story at all how children cared for as orphans on March 17, 1955, were cared for as idiots, mentally deficient, and retarded children on March 18, 1955. Mental patients were moved into what were formally orphanages, and orphans were moved into mental institutions. The biggest thing it doesn’t say is that they didn’t teach orphans and look after mental patients in the same facility. Everyone was now a mental patient.

How many innocuous sentences do we read in history books that don’t tell the whole story? To be fair it is not possible to tell the whole story, every person’s side of the story, and have everyone happy with what was said. This story however from what I can glean is so horrific it was easier to believe they were just taking extra money to care for orphans, but the orphans were still cared for, educated, and given the best life afforded by the circumstances, and the reason for it was because the Federal Government paid more for the care of mentally challenged children in asylums than orphans in orphanages.

The horror comes when we realize they deliberately misdiagnosed normal children as profoundly mentally deficient to do this.

If we were put in a mental facility and our medical diagnosis said we needed to be there, how could we prove we didn’t?

Man’s inhumanity to man is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep. Alexander Berkman

Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn? Robert Burns

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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The Home for Unwanted Girls: The heart-wrenching, gripping story of a mother-daughter bond that could not be broken – inspired by true events Paperback – April 17 2018

by Joanna Goodman (Author)4.7 out of 5 stars 714 ratings

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Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? Paperback – Large Print, Aug. 29 2020

by Belynda Wilson Thomas (Author)5.0 out of 5 stars 2 ratings

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Facing death enriching life. Facing our fears means we can trust the process of life.

Facing our fears means we can trust the process of life. Facing death enriching life.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

It is not length of life, but depth of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Are we okay with facing death, and through that acceptance enriching our lives? In the past, some people kept a skull on their desks to remind them that they too, will die. Is this the most horrible thought or one, if we kept at the forefront of our life would help us live it differently?

We are told in the bible 1 Corinthians, “Death, where art thou sting? Aleteia, a Nun in her blog says she got a little ceramic skull she keeps on her desk as a memento mori, the Latin phrase for “Remember you will die.” She says it is changing her life. For her, the skull reminds her that her life will end, and her goal is heaven.

We may not like to think about it, but it is the end for all of us. I met someone a few years ago whose grandmother had cancer and wasn’t expected to have long to live. Every night she cleaned her house so if she died in the night her house would be clean. She lived for six years, and said, “It takes a long time to die.” Did she live those six years more fully, or was she just waiting to die? I wasn’t wise enough to ask that important question.

We don’t know how long we have on earth. We know we have today, and we should make it count. Are we healing rifts in our families? Are we encouraging people in their lives?

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death. Leonardo do Vinci

There are hard truths in life and if we accept them and build our life with them it will make it a better life.

Life is hard, not always but sometimes. We need to be grateful for everything in our lives. Life is fleeting, beauty is fleeting, and relationships are fleeting.

Each one of us is not that important.

We are not in control. Suffering is the fear we are not in control. If we accept we are not in control it means we can learn how to trust the process of life.

We are going to die. If we don’t embrace death then we fear it and that fear stops us from living our life. We will die but we have today and however more tomorrows we have. If we embrace death maybe we will live a better life?

Where would we go?

Who would we forgive?

What would we create?

In the 15th and 16th centuries, ivory skulls were all the rage. Some believe this was not so much a response to the fragility of life, but rather the comforts that people were feeling, and a way of saying, “Don’t get too caught up in the ways in which your life is better than what your grandparents experienced.” They might have been getting distracted from faith and moral duties by luxury goods and treasures instead of remembering the fragility of life.

The more life changes the more it stays the same. Is that where we are now? Are we getting caught up in luxury goods? A skull is also a symbol we are all equal. The rich skull doesn’t look different from a poor skull, and we will all become skulls in the end.

Underneath everything, we are naked and afraid. We clothe our nakedness to give us confidence and we wear luxury goods to make ourselves feel important and to make other people feel we are important. Underneath we are all the same, and we are all ending up in the same place.

We will all be equally dead. We have choices to make while we are alive, what will they be?

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. Kahlil Gibran

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. Marcus Aurelius

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Marie Curie

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12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

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12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos  Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Jordan B. Peterson (Author, Narrator), Norman Doidge MD – foreword (Author), Random House Canada (Publisher)

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Becoming better not bitter. Rolling with the punches life throws at us.

Rolling with the punches life throws at us. Becoming better not bitter.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Life is about change, sometimes you just have to roll with the punches. Caroline Manzo

Picking the tomatoes feels like the beginning of settling in for winter. Winter is one of the forces that shape our lives. If we like squirrels gather enough to get through and have seeds to plant the next year we like the squirrels are successful.

Is this going to be the winter of our discontent? We don’t know what the future holds but as I listened to a sermon from Church of the Rock out of Winnipeg the Pastor told us we must live life for the long haul. We don’t know when we will be free of mask-wearing and what if it is required for longer than we think. We must figure out how to go about our business so we still have businesses. We must live our lives. So many couples have postponed weddings this year, but is it really prudent to wait until…

Too many things in our lives can wait until… Until they never happen. We’ve all thought of doing things we didn’t do. Some of the things we didn’t do might be good, but we see other people doing what we thought of, but never implemented.

We always have to make the best of our situation even if we would like it to be different. When I look over my Mother’s life I think what a time to have lived through. Her parents would have gotten married just after the Spanish Flue of 1919, then came the crash of 1929, the dirty thirties, and the Second World War. It was a rough start for that generation but they built their lives. My generation has lived in relative ease, peace, and plenty.

We may be going through the defining moments of our time. We need to do what we can to help others but what we most need to do is help ourselves to live good lives. We don’t know if we are at the beginning, the end, or the end of the beginning. What we do know is even though we have some problems in our society, it is a good society. It is easier to tear things down than it is to build them up. This is true of our health, businesses, communities, cities, and countries.

She stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails. Elizabeth Edwards

We have a lot to be thankful for. Not giving up is how the greatest generation and their parents lived from 1914 to 1945. For anyone living through that time, it had to seem like one thing after another. None of us know what is in our future, but we have to do our best with what we have.

Last night on Sixty Minutes, an Architect became blind after an operation to remove a brain tumor. What is a blind Architect to do? The Social Worker came in 24 hours after it was confirmed his loss of sight was total and permanent to talk about career options.

He has found a way to work as a blind Architect. He found a printing company that could emboss the plans so he can feel the lines. He uses a crayon that leaves a raised line to make changes. He says he can feel the spaces he used to see. He is working to help design buildings that are assessable to the blind. Blind people are totally dependent on public transportation and they need to be able to navigate through the maze we sighted people get confused in. He has worked on projects like these. He sees the possibilities in his life he didn’t see before. He said, “If his sight was restored he doesn’t think it would actually make his life better now.”

Maybe that is the question. What does make life better? Maybe learning to roll with the punches that life throws at us and turn them into something good is what makes life better. Learning and growing through challenges whatever they are might be what makes life better. What if we embrace challenges as opportunities for growth?

What if everything we are going through now makes us better as a people, society, country, and world?

When something goes wrong in your life, just yell, “Plot Twist!” and move on. Unknown

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it. Lou Holtz

Always believe something wonderful is going to happen. Even with all the ups and downs, never take a day for granted. Smile, cherish the little things and don’t forget to hug the ones you love. Brigitte Nicole

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Paperback – Illustrated, Dec 26 2007

by Carol S. Dweck (Author)

Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? by [Belynda Wilson Thomas]

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Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? Kindle Edition

by Belynda Wilson Thomas (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

Posted on by BWThomas

Choices and commitment. Are we committed to our choices?

Are we committed to our choices? Choices and commitment.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

He who has a  why to live for can bear almost any how. Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes in life one thing happens and another thing happens and we feel like what we are trying to do will never become reality. This is where commitment comes in. If we are committed to our goal, path, dream, family, career, we play whack-a-mole when we have to. We change things but we keep moving forward. This is what commitment is, if we are derailed too easily then maybe it was a wish and a hope but not something we were committed too.

When we plunk our money down to buy a house or property we are usually committed to getting through whatever challenges it takes for the house or property to finally be ours. We will jump through the hoops to make sure the financing goes through. We will get another lawyer; find the insurance company that will ensure the house or property, we will search for the documents or get documents that prove income. Whatever is asked of us we will do because we are committed and the prize at the end is worth all the trouble it took getting there.

We will not be equally committed to everything in our lives. We need a hierarchy of commitments. Everything in our life is not equal and if we want to know what is on our hierarchy list we need to look at what we are spending our time doing?

We always have to make choices in our lives and when we look back on our lives it is colored by the choices we were committed to. Some people become rich because they were committed to the choices and decisions that led them to a wealthy life. Some people are fit because their choices led them there. Some people have a balanced life where they seem to have enough of everything.

Do we choose what kind of life we want to build?. At certain times in our lives, we feel we have no choices to make, we have to live with the choices already made. That is why when we face big choices like who to marry, what type of business, career, or job to pursue, and where to live we need to make good choices.

We always have choices to make. What we choose for dinner impacts our health. What we choose to listen to impacts our frame of mind. Who we spend time with impacts many things. Do we make our choices based on long term goals or short term goals? We might make a terrible choice in a moment that impacts ourselves and others, forever.

We sometimes make choices that impact our lives innocently believing it was just another Sunday, but it was the Sunday that changed our life. We have many of those kinds of days if we look back. The day we met our husband or wife was usually ordinary in many ways but it changed the course of our life. Did we choose to stay where we grew up or leave? Did we choose to buy a home or property and which home and what property impacted our lives? We don’t know where different choices would have taken us.

Commitment is a choice to give up other choices. Scott Stanley

There is no going back, even if we try and move back to our home town.  We aren’t going back to how it was before we left; it is a new choice going forward. We make choices that impact our lives every day. If we think about them too hard we may feel we should not make any choices. We get stuck. We need to have faith in ourselves, faith in those around us, and faith in our ability to deal with obstacles that get in our way. Sometimes we can only choose between two bad choices or two good choices and we have to make the best choice and live with the consequences. We have to have a commitment to the choice and make the best of it. Other times we can choose again.

We can be too committed to the wrong choice, and not committed enough to a good choice. We don’t always know which is which. Life is about making choices and then making the best of those choices. As Kenny Rogers said, “We need to know when to hold em, when to fold em, and when to run.” Knowing this can be one of the hardest things in life.

We won’t always make the best choice. We won’t always be committed to the right things. We won’t always give up on the wrong things when we should. Life will unfold how it does and some of it seems inevitable, like no matter which choice we make it will be the wrong one, or a bad one. Sometimes we can’t look too far ahead because it will frighten us too much. Sometimes we have to take the next small step and then the next one and eventually we can look forward, and we can look back to see how far we’ve come.

Choices and commitment will color our lives. In the end, our lives will be the sum total of what we have chosen and committed to. When we make our choices are we committed to them?

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying “I will try again tomorrow.” Mary Anne Radmacher

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Steve Jobs

Some say that our lives are defined by the sum of our choices. But, it isn’t really our choices that distinguish who we are. It’s our commitment to them. Emily Thorne

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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Secrets and Silence: What if your biggest secret became public? Paperback – Large Print, Aug. 29 2020

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