Posted on by BWThomas

Choices in actions and choices in attitude, we are blessed if we have the ability to choose.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Life is a chess match. Every decision that you make has a consequence to it. P.K. Subban

Do we get to, want to, have to, or should do things in our lives, and do how we look at these things change them? I have to water my dahlias becomes I get to water my dahlias. I have to phone Mom becomes I get to phone Mom. It won’t be long and watering dahlias won’t be an option, they will be done for the year, but I can enjoy them now. 

We cannot turn every have-to into a want-to. Sometimes we just have to do it and get it over with and go about our life. Do we have to go for a walk, usually not, but we may want to, or think we should, and if we are lucky we get to. There are people who do not get to say,” Let’s go for a walk,” because they are unable to walk. How lucky are we if we can and do? Many people cannot water or weed their gardens because they do not have one. Not everyone gets to cook today, some because they are not able; because they are no longer in their own home, and some because they have no food to cook.

We may have things on our list we don’t want to do, but feel we should, we must, or we have to do. Is our life the sum of the choices we have made? If we want a better life do we need to make better choices? What if we chose to go for a walk every day? What if we chose to eat for health? The two choices that lead to the greatest amount of happiness in our lives I think are the choice of who we choose as a spouse and what we choose as our livelihood. Perhaps if we realized what a momentous choice it was when we made them we would be so filled with fear we wouldn’t make a choice at all. We make our choices and then we live with them and hopefully make the best of them.

Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you. John C. Maxwell

When we visit somewhere with breathtaking vistas of mountains, oceans, and scenery that take our breath away we think what would our lives be like if we could live here? Life would still be life with all its challenges but does living amongst beauty add to our lives? There is beauty everywhere if we look for it. It might not be the grandeur of snow-covered mountain peaks, but we can stroll in a park, a public garden, or if we are lucky our own garden.

Having our own garden to sit in is a joy; to be surrounded by greenery and flowers gives us a lift. My garden needs tending because the weeds are taking over, and if we let them they do take over. If we weed every week it isn’t that daunting but with going away and not weeding since we got back I have to get out there and create order out of chaos.

I wonder if our life isn’t always moving towards one of two extremes, too orderly, or too chaotic. Too orderly has never been one of my failings and I’ve sometimes thought it might be better to be too orderly than too chaotic if one had to choose, but too orderly may be harder to live with. It is finding the balance that is the challenge.

Choices, choices, choices, if we are lucky we have choices to make, if we are wise we make the right ones. The challenge is to know which choice will be the best one over time. Tonight I can work in the garden or go to the gym but doing both will be a challenge. I think the garden should win out. I could have weeded this weekend but Saturday it rained, and yesterday we had visitors. I could have, I would have, I should have, but I didn’t do it so it is still to be done. I get to, I want to, I have to, and I should, so I will and then it will be done until it needs to be done again.

Is making our lives better as easy as choosing what is the next thing we must do, can do, should do, get to do, or want to do and then do it?

The quality of your life ultimately depends on the quality of your decisions. Ray Dalio

The hardest decisions in life are not between good and bad or right and wrong, but between two goods or two rights. Joe Andrew

Nothing happens until you decide. Make a decision and watch your life move forward. Oprah Winfrey

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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Thank you to everyone that reads my books, and a special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Life is a series of small steps that propel us forward.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Every day is a new beginning, take a deep breath, smile, and start again. Winston Porter

If we want to do anything we have to start small. There will be the first time we give a presentation, go for a job interview, or put ourselves out in some small way. Everyone has to be a beginner before they become what they become. We sometimes think the small, halting first steps aren’t important, but what if they are the most important? Without the first step, the next steps don’t happen.

What if what we often do is worry about the next steps before the first steps are completed? We worry about publishing and agents before we’ve written the book. Life is a series of steps we take, and each person’s steps are different as is each person’s life. Even if we try and duplicate someone else’s steps we won’t get the same outcome necessarily. Sometimes we worry about failure before we’ve even tried, which of course guarantees it. Even if no one but ourselves knows we failed to try, we know, and we are one of the important people in our lives.

I was looking forward to putting on a “Storytime” later this summer, but it ended up not working out to the disappointment of me and other authors that were also going to read their books. We may still get the opportunity to do it, but something else has come up that I never expected. Sometimes we are going in one direction and we end up in another direction, but had we not been going in the first direction the second direction might never have happened.

Jim Rohn tells us, “Life has strange ways.” We need to be willing to ride the roller coaster of life. Disappointments will come, but maybe something better is also coming.

What if we find in the end that who we help and encourage on the road in life is the sum total of our lives? This is why being a parent is the biggest challenge in our lives, we are responsible for a whole person, and in some cases many people. As I watch our grandson not quite willing to take those first halting steps. He crawls up and down the stairs, and can get from one end of the house to the other in a flash by crawling. With speed like that, he might think who needs to walk?

A single tiny step you actually take is better than any big plan left undone. Jane Lee Logan

He’s playing the piano with two hands exuberantly, and one afternoon he went from the drum, playing piano, to the guitar, and xylophone, going from one to the other and back again. He is of course the most wonderful little boy we’ve had the pleasure of knowing, this is what every grandparent thinks. We hope as grandparents we can widen his horizons. He likes to look at the books I’ve written and he knows it’s my picture on the back cover.

Life is so wonderful when we have children and grandchildren to share it with. Even if no one outside of our family knows who we were if we raise our family to take their place in the world and they in turn do the same, we’ve done our part, we’ve made our contribution.

I look at Mom turning 99 this year, (We’ve started planning her 100th birthday for next year). What a life she has lived, what an array of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren she has.

Sometimes it seems to me that we who grew up in easy, prosperous years are more pessimistic about the future than those who grew up in tough times. We think we, our children, or grandchildren couldn’t face those tough times and be okay. Those who have faced tough times know it is possible to get through tough times to better times.

Where do grit and fortitude come from? Are some born with it, or can we all develop it, and if we can all develop it, then why don’t we? I ask this as I think of people who give up when others trudge steadily onward. Part of life is making a decision about how we will handle what life throws at us. We might not like what is coming, but we have to deal with it, and if we can deal with it in a way that makes us and our family proud, I think we’ll all feel better in the end.

Courage is not having the strength to go on; it’s going on when you don’t have the strength. Theodore Roosevelt

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one. Mark Twain

Don’t underestimate the power of small steps to build a great future. Jocelyn Soriano

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

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate link.

Posted on by BWThomas

Life happens to all of us, how we react to it is what we control

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

In the end, it’s not the years in your life that counts. It’s the life in your years. Abraham Lincoln

Sometimes things happen that jerk us up short and we feel mortal. Someone younger than us, considered healthy or healthier than us, dies of a heart attack. A relative is in the hospital with something that seemed to come out of nowhere. We wonder if this could happen to us too, and of course, we know the answer is yes. We aren’t special; we don’t have some protective magic protecting us from the hard things in life.

We realize that health really is our first wealth, and what should we do to be healthier? What do we want to accomplish, if retirement is looming we wonder what will we do with our time no longer taken up by working. Do we have a passion to pursue, an interest to discover, or a hobby to take up? If we are alone we may wonder if we have another thirty or forty lonely years ahead of us, if we aren’t alone we worry about when we might be.

If we’ve watched our parents as they’ve aged and they’ve had reasonable health, reasonable resources to live on, and had hobbies and interests then aging may not be as scary for some of us as it is for others. Getting old is not fun but it’s the best option we have, and if we can do it gracefully, and healthily with mind and body intact it may be an enjoyable stage in life.

We’ll need to trust that we can keep ourselves healthy enough, and have enough income to more than scrape by. In old age, I think financial security is a big thing because we aren’t in most cases able to physically make more money but our investments can produce fruit. We aren’t planting the money trees anymore but we can harvest them.

We might not be having big adventures when we reach advanced age, but we are watching our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have theirs. If our family is doing well we will feel grateful and blessed. No one only gets blessings to be grateful for, everyone gets challenges to overcome, deal with, and make the best of.

Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years. Blaise Pascal

Is trusting we can get through all of life and deal with the trials and tribulations that come along with the joys the way to look at life? If we can believe whatever comes we can deal with, whether highs or lows it will be better for us. We may think why someone doesn’t do this or that to improve their health, wouldn’t it be better if they ate this way or that way? If there truly is a better diet we should follow it to be an example of what is possible, giving advice might make us feel better, but what do we know about their health? We need to trust them to make the best decisions for themselves, and even if we know they aren’t making the best decisions, it’s their life. They will seek out advice that may help them or not, it is their life, not ours. We need to be our own control board, but we can’t be someone else’s.

I am trying to curb my advice-giving ways. Who am I to know how someone else should live, what decisions they’ve had to make, what they have to deal with? It is probably better if we can be with people where they are and encourage them to do what they can do, not what we think they should do. This might be the hardest way to support them, to keep our opinions and advice to ourselves while we support them in their time of need.

Sometimes we know the outcome is not good. In truth, we know the outcome is not good for all of us; we will all have to face the reality of our own demise. Is the best way to face our death making the most of our life? I didn’t mean for this to be a morbid post. But, death is part of our reality, our own, and those we love. How can we live so when the time comes we are ready, we’ve made the best of the time we’ve had? We made phone calls while we could, we visited when possible, we laughed and held hands, encouraged others, and let them encourage us. It isn’t only about living more years, but putting more life into our years that counts.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life will always be hectic and complicated. Stop waiting for life get easier or better in order to be happy. Learn to be happy now. Karen Salmansohn

Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. Charles R. Swindoll

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you to everyone that reads my books, and a special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Trusting the process of life and doing our part to make things better.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about. Margaret J. Wheatley

Trust the process of life. This is a statement we see thrown around a lot. What else can we do but trust the process of life, we rail against unfairness, and I rail against it more than I should.

Things shouldn’t be this way, people shouldn’t act like that, they don’t have the right, and it isn’t fair. Who says, and who is in control? If we don’t trust the process how can we live? When we see a cat with a mouse the process of life is at work, we might be happy if we are the cat, but what if we are the mouse?

Many of us in life feel we are the mouse. We aren’t in control of the big decisions; we don’t see life working out with our best interests in mind. We feel small in the big process of life, we feel our decisions hardly matter, and this is a dangerous way to feel. Some people feel if they looked different or came from somewhere else when they get to Canada they’d be treated differently.

We may have things at play we don’t understand, things we need to see are being brought out into the open and in the fullness of time what if the process of life works to make things better? That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of suffering in the process, and if we are one of the ones that suffer we won’t like it, but as Shakespeare said, “We are all actors on the stage.”

Children being exploited are being brought to our attention and the Movie, “Sound of Freedom” is highlighting this.   What if this horrible situation has to come to our attention before it can be dealt with, what if it takes years, years, and years to get resolved? People have been exploited in the past, and we have righted some of those wrongs.

What if righting wrongs is one of the processes of life, but it is a messy part, and we can think the problem is too big to make a difference, but what if that is rarely true? What if making a difference is something we can all do in big and small ways? What if trusting the process is making where we are the best it can be and helping those in our circle of influence, and as our circle enlarges we help more and more, and what if even if our circle never enlarges what we do is still important?

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. R. Buckminster Fuller

What if instead of fighting about what someone else should do we concentrate on what we can do? What if pointing the finger at someone else often means we aren’t doing what is in front of us to do? Building a strong family means children are not easily exploited. I believe strong families build a strong country and where children are being exploited the family and society have broken down, and both need to be built back stronger and better.

It may seem selfish to some to concentrate on our own family, but if we are a strong family, building strong children who create strong families then we are not one of the problems society has to deal with. In a strong society, the breakdown of a family may not be a death sentence, but in a weak one, it might be.

Our beliefs don’t make us a better person our behavior does, and we show people who we are by what we do. We need to not give up on others or ourselves to build a better life, family, society, and world, but what does that look like?

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all. Dale Carnegie

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings. Albert Einstein

The most dangerous creation for any society is the man who has nothing to lose. James Baldwin

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Choices, making the right choice, are we making the best of the choices we’ve made?

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Life is about choices. Some we regret, some we’re proud of. Some will haunt us forever. The message: We are what we choose to be. Graham Brown

Getting back into the swing of things after a break always takes a bit of time. How many of us who couldn’t go to the gym during covid are back to the routine we were before? I’m not; gym time is taken up by other things.

Life changes and we change with it, sometimes we love the changes, and sometimes we don’t. Some things we can change and some things we can’t. Life is constantly evolving; we aren’t the only person in our life, and we must consider other people.

We may even have moments when we ask ourselves why we are working so hard. What are we trying to prove or accomplish, and what is being sacrificed? We may have other times when we ask ourselves why we aren’t working harder, and why we aren’t accomplishing more. We may think hard work will bring certain rewards, but we don’t always see the results we hoped for. Sometimes every step forward seems like a couple of steps backward, and we see others get bigger results with seemingly less work. Comparing ourselves to others is one of the biggest ways to be unhappy.

Every choice comes with a consequence. Once you make a choice, you must accept responsibility. You cannot escape the consequences of your choice, whether you like them or not. Roy T. Bennett

We need to be okay with ourselves, who we are, who we’ve been, what comes easy, and what we struggle with. There are many things about ourselves we can’t change no matter how hard we try. We have the bone structure we have, the ancestors we have, and the family we were born into, adopted by, or grew up with. We are where we are in the world, and we may be happy with where we are or want to change it. We may have many choices to make in life or only a few.

We think we will be happier with more choices but research doesn’t seem to hold this to be true. This may be why our society is not as happy as we think it should be, after all, we have so much choice, and instead of making us happy we always feel we could have and should have made a better choice, which leads to unhappiness.

There might have been a time when there was a limited pool of people to choose as our mate and we made the best choice. Now there are so many choices some people can’t choose from the array of options because what if there is a better choice? In a store, there might be too few choices, but we can be in stores where there are too many choices and we get confused. Picking the best pair of jeans out of ten works, but what about out of ten thousand?

Much of life is making a choice and then making the best of it. If we decide we are having chicken for dinner then we can make the best chicken dinner we are capable of. If we can’t choose what to make for dinner, and five-thirty rolls around without dinner started we have fewer options than we had earlier. In a pinch, we might opt for scrambled eggs and toast which will fill us up but not thought of as dinner food. If we had all afternoon to make dinner this may be a letdown, but if we just got in after a hard day, a quick easy meal instead of take-out might be a win.

Choices, choices, choices, we may be frustrated by too many, or too few choices. Life is a balancing act and we are told the better we balance it, the better our life will be. But, we see people whose life is totally out of balance and they are incredibly successful. Shouldn’t we aspire to that kind of success? Chances are we will all have some successes and failures in life. We will have to deal with how our life unfolds and make the best of it. Is there a choice we can make today that will move us in a better direction?

Look for your choices, pick the best one, then go with it. Pat Riley

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears. Nelson Mandela

Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Giving is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely. Roy T. Bennett

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you to those that read my books, and a special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads, and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Holidays and memories, celebrating milestones, and back to real life.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

The best things in life are the people we love, the places we’ve been, and the memories we’ve made along the way. Unknown

Yesterday was my husband’s and my thirty-seventh wedding anniversary. My husband was listening to a podcast, I can’t remember the podcaster’s name, but he was saying he didn’t like Jordan Peterson’s advice on marriage; “He’s only been married once.” Our daughter says, “Isn’t that the point, to only be married once.”

Staying married isn’t about finding the perfect person who always acts perfectly or being the perfect person who always acts perfectly, that’s a fantasy, and fantasies don’t come true. Real people get married, and lead real lives, with ups and downs, good times and bad, and getting through them together is the challenge. Anyone can throw the towel in at any time, but giving up on marriage is like giving up on anything else, something can’t become a success once we give up on it. We don’t finish what we start if we quit halfway through.

I’m not saying no one should get a divorce, and I’m not judging those that do, but I prefer to take advice from those that have gotten through the tough stuff that inevitably comes with a long marriage. I am blessed with a wonderful husband, two great-kids, a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law, and now a grandson. One of the secrets to staying married is to not throw the divorce word around, if you put it out there, and your partner says, “Okay then.” You are getting a divorce and most times neither of you can take it back, even if you think it would be best for all concerned. I wonder how many reasonable marriages end because of something like that, a moment of weakness when we give up on each other?

Don’t count the days. Make the days count. Muhammad Ali

We got back from our road trip to B.C. and Alberta. Our schedule was packed and it was wonderful for our kids to meet some of their cousins again as adults. We had time with Mom; I stayed at her place while everyone else went to a BnB so I could maximize my visit with her. We were up at six o’clock talking before everyone else showed up, and we talked until bedtime every night after they left.

At the BnB, a turkey mother saved her chick from a hawk attack while our kids watched, nature, red in tooth and claw they saw firsthand. City kids are protected from the ferocity of nature and survival. Predators are everywhere and to live a good life we have to be aware of predators, in the wild we know who is who, in the city not so much.

We were out and about in downtown Vancouver and Calgary and on the street were the down and out, the drug-addicted, and unfortunate. Will decriminalizing drugs help mitigate the problem? I believe if we knew how to fix the problem we would try our best as a society to do it. But, how do we fix it? Does anyone have the answer? Does it come down to personal responsibility, choices, consequences, and helping people get back on their feet when they choose to turn their life around?

The time in Vancouver and Calgary makes me think if I would have loved living out West more than I’ve loved living in Ontario. It’s like marriage, you make your choice, live with it, and make the best of what you have. Life has been great for me in Ontario. There are always things we like about somewhere else, but home is home. After a wonderful trip of sightseeing, new experiences, and reconnecting with people, it is back to our regular wonderful life.

Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. Doug Ivester

The greatest legacy we can leave our children is happy memories. Og Mandino

You will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory. Unknown

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a wonderful day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you to those that read my books, and a special thank you to those that leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.