Posted on by BWThomas

What does making things better for the next generation look like?

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

The future belongs to those who give the next generation a reason for hope. Unknown

At a family gathering yesterday, celebrating our great-niece’s 12th birthday, our daughter-in-law said, “It’s so interesting watching people become grandparents.” She’s watched us and her parents become grandparents. Mom became a grandma in her thirties, and my mother-in-law as well. But many of us are now in our sixties and even seventies before we become grandparents. A first-time grandma in her sixties tells me her daughter’s husband is a first-time grandfather, I’m guessing in his seventies, and he got a tear in his eye when he became a grandfather because he didn’t expect to live to experience it.

Grandparents add so much to their grandchildren’s lives, and grandchildren add a dimension to their grandparents’ lives they didn’t realize they were missing. Life opens up in a new way when watching the development of grandchildren.

It is truly special to have a place in a young child’s life and heart. My grandson confided in me yesterday, “Grandma, I’m having a bad day.” He was going to a different barbecue than we attended, and I told him the day would get better.

We were talking about family trees toward the end of the evening, and someone remarked, “We should be talking about the living and not the dead.” I find it interesting when people talk about the history of places and the people who inhabited them, the challenges they faced and overcame. If we are always interested in other people’s stories and not our own, we’ll always feel other people have accomplished more.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. Dale Carnegie

We are often impressed by people, but if we don’t know where they came from, it might be hard to measure their journey. If we start two-thirds of the way up the mountain and make it to the top, it might not be as much of an accomplishment as those who start at the bottom and make it to the middle.

Life unfolds how it will; we aren’t in control of the times we grew up in or the times now. We might look back and think those were the good old days, or we might feel blessed to live when we did. Life isn’t so much about getting dealt a good hand, but about playing the hand we are dealt well.

It’s always lovely at events to see the next generation growing up. Each generation has to find its way. It is easy to be disillusioned; it is easy to think things used to be better, but life is always a mix of bitter and sweet. No time has been all good or all bad. Seeing and seizing the opportunities is part of the journey.

Has it always been possible to build a good life? Our choices and attitude will determine the life we build, and how we feel about it. Should we, instead of wishing things were better, be grateful they aren’t worse, and do what we can to make life as good as it can be? Being a grandparent is enjoying the big and little things, and by wanting a bright future for our grandchildren, we build a bright future for all.

Legacy is not what I did for myself. It’s what I’m doing for the next generation. Vitor Belfort

If the winds of fortune are temporarily blowing against you, remember that you can harness them and make them carry you toward your definite purpose, through the use of your imagination. Napoleon Hill

The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it. Abraham Lincoln

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Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those who 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

Making choices, setting goals, and facing our fears.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Bertrand Russell

Life moves along as we make our choices, set our goals, and face our fears. No matter how bad something is, can we make it worse? Does life roll along until something blindsides us? Something we didn’t see coming has to be dealt with, and we don’t know where we’ll be at the end of it. Can we have faith we can get through it, tunnel under it, or rise above it, but somehow come out the other end okay? We’ll be changed for sure, maybe we’ll have more empathy for others, understand we are more resilient than we thought, and go forward with a wider view of life.

Facing challenges may bring us closer as we join forces to get through challenging times. Jim Rohn tells us, “Don’t ask for it to be easy, ask to be better.” When we read books and watch movies, the story is about overcoming a challenge; sailing along might be a small part of the story, but the real story is overcoming something.

How many people have started over and built a better life than they had? I can’t imagine how hard life is for people living in war-torn lands. We hear about people who have faced the worst in life, found themselves in a new country, and excel at building a life.

When we look at fit and healthy people, they have built a life that keeps them fit and healthy. Their choices lead to a healthy life. We are the sum of our choices, and even if we don’t think we have enough choices, we still have many to make every day, leading to a worse or better life.

We might think we need to make big choices to improve our life, but what if the choice between water and pop, or pasta and salad, is a choice we make most days, and it improves our life?

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination. Carl Rogers

What if we chose to go for a walk every day? What if we brought more movement into our lives, elevated our diet, and found other ways to improve our lives? What if every time we see something that could become a problem, we take care of it? There are many choices we can make to elevate our lives, and making one choice leads to other choices.

Our choices will reverberate throughout the years. What choices can we make that will pay dividends in the future? What choices have negative consequences? Family, friendship, and work are the cornerstones we use to build our lives. We need faith to build better lives and move forward. There comes a time when we retire from work, but we still need to find purpose and service, something to do, that will give us a feeling of achievement.

Finding balance is always difficult; when we are busy, finding leisure is the challenge. When we have nothing but leisure, finding meaning and purpose is a challenge. Facing the challenges in life builds a good life. Building a life of purpose and service in every stage of our lives gives us a reason to get up in the morning.

Do we have challenges we need to face boldly? Are there opportunities in our challenges?

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. Eleanor Roosevelt

Life itself is a privilege, but to live life to the fullest well, that is a choice. Andy Andrews

We are not given a good life or a bad life. We are given a life. It’s up to us to make it good or bad. Unknown

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read more, and 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 who take the time to leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and make a purchase, I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Choosing the right path, or making the chosen path right?

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. William James

Have you ever wondered what might have been if you took a different path? Saturday night, I watched a movie, “The Five Year Plan,” a college graduate takes a pregnancy test the night of her graduation. The movie is her two selves and the lives they lead, one having a baby, the other pursuing her dreams. At the end of five years in both scenarios, she’s had her ups and downs. They meet each other in the same bathroom where she’s waiting to see if she’s pregnant. They look at each other and say, “You okay?” They nod, and we know she knows she can handle life however it plays out.

Having faith in the future, knowing we can handle life however it unfolds, is important. There will always be something in life we’d rather not face, and we often hope for something eluding our grasp. If we decide in one direction, we often wonder what would have happened if we’d taken a different path. We can’t go forward without a decision, and learning to make decisions and dealing with what is, creates our life.

In the writing group I’m part of, writers are writing powerful stories. Stories they feel compelled to tell, which I think are the best kinds of stories. We all have stories, and sometimes the stories we feel compelled to tell aren’t our personal story. It’s a story that family members went through. Do we try and tell the truth as we understand it, or can fiction tell the larger story through characters who are a compilation of people who might have lived through the challenging times of the story?

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. Georgia O’Keefe

I’ve often wondered how to tell someone else’s story, because so much of what someone thought or did would have to be fiction. Even if I tried to write my own story – using journals, much of it would be fiction because I would make sense of the past by what I know now, and who I’ve become.

If we’ve kept a journal, we have a window into the life we’ve led, but even it, we’ve edited as we wrote. Life can be messy, and if we try to connect the dots looking back over our lives, we aren’t seeing from the same vantage point as when we were living our lives, and making impactful decisions. Some decisions seemed small but had a huge impact, and some seemed big but in the end were insignificant.

Life is full of big and small moments. These moments add up to our lives; my granddaughter’s face lights up when I say good morning. How much poorer my life would be without my grandson and granddaughter. We might choose to have children, but grandchildren are a gift we are given because of someone else’s choices.

Life unfolds, and we have an impact and input in some areas, but others are beyond our control. We need to be able to deal with whatever comes and make the best of what is on offer. Does faith that we will be okay no matter what give us the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other?

You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too. That’s a part of it. Denzel Washington

Challenges are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. Unknown

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Maya Angelou

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read 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 who 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

Do we worry about what will happen, and also make choices knowing they could end badly?

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Living in a state of gratitude is the gateway to grace. Arianna Huffington

What would living in a state of gratitude look like, or a state of grace? If we are grateful for what we have, would we still be grasping for what we don’t have? My grandson comes to me as I write this, asking me to read a story. He chooses “Krypto Goes to Puppy School.” He sits on my lap and asks, “What happened to him?” It is based on our first family dog.

I didn’t know what to say, so I told him the truth. “He got old, and he died, so he’s no longer with us.”

He says emphatically, “He’s still with us.” It would be interesting to know what goes on in the mind of a three-year-old. He makes observations that blow us away. It’s like there is wisdom in his innocence.

My youngest sister had her daughter the year after Dad died. Her daughter talked about Dad in her early years as if she’d met him.  One day she said to my sister, “Grandpa was a really nice man.” It came out of the blue, she was little when she said it, maybe the age of my grandson or younger.

My granddaughter was born a month and a day before what would have been Mom’s one-hundredth birthday. Mom lived to ninety-nine and two months. Will she have something to say about Mom when she starts to talk? Will I read something into what she says that isn’t there?

We read about people who say they’ve visited the other side. When we hear something hinting of that from someone we know, it gives us pause. What happens to us at death, or before birth?

Being around children opens us up to energy and observations we don’t get any other way. They say things, and we wonder where that came from. They take life as it comes, melting down one moment, and laughing the next, but being fully engaged in life.

What if we could live in the moment, trusting that what comes next will be okay, and no matter what, we will deal with it? What if worrying about tomorrow is how we destroy the joy we should have today? If what we worry about comes true, we have to deal with it, but we also didn’t enjoy what we could have, and worrying didn’t change anything. What if worry is even more destructive than that? What if worrying makes us feel we are doing something, so we don’t take action to make things better when we had the opportunity?

What can we do today to make things better for ourselves or someone else? Here we are, between planting and harvest, and if we didn’t plant anything, we can’t look forward to a bountiful harvest. The internet is full of doom and gloom; it’s enough to make anyone want to bury their head in the sand.

As I write, my husband is listening to a podcast on real estate where a deal didn’t go through because the seller didn’t understand the amount of money he owed on the property. When he was given the total bill, it didn’t make sense to close the deal. The buyer is left with a moving truck and nowhere to move into. He said, “I could sue, but the seller is broke, so that wouldn’t do me any good. I’m back on the hunt for a house.”

Is life complicated, and we have to deal with it, or is life simple, but we make it complicated?

Gratitude is a powerful catalyst for happiness. It’s the spark that lights a fire of joy in your soul. Amy Collette

Years ago, my husband and I sold our condo. It didn’t close on the expected date, because the buyers agreed to rent to us upon closing, but their lawyer insisted they take possession of a vacant condo. The closing date was revised, we scrambled to find a rental, and in the end, it worked out. Had we been closing on a new property that day, our house of cards would have come falling down.

If we were to sell our house now, my husband and I agree, we would sell, then rent, so we couldn’t be caught up in someone else’s deal not going through. This would give us the freedom to search for where we want to go next with cash in hand, and in a market like this, cash is king.

Why worry about the domino effect of numerous deals when we don’t have to? Mitigating risk is one of the ways to live a good life. Is it easier to live in a state of grace if we haven’t set our lives up more precariously than we have to? We have to trust we can deal with what life brings, but we also have a hand in what that will be by the choices we make.

What if we can live our lives with the faith children have that life will work out? We enjoy the moments of joy, we feel the hard parts of life, but then get on with life with a song in our heart and a smile on our face?

Children see magic because they look for it. Christopher Moore

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. Jean de La Bruyere

When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Tecumseh

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read 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 who 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.