Sage Old Advice

 I am grateful to have a friend that is also a very gifted writer. He and I were speaking the other day about life, our writings, and how each of us react or should react to what comes our way.  He stated he was going to send my and "old" piece of his that he thought I would really appreciate. Below is that piece and yes, I appreciated it so much I wanted to share it. So with his permission...



                                                                          Sage Old Advice

Doctor Dillard was the company doctor.  Actually, he was a retired heart surgeon that took this part time consulting job probably just for grins.  He did annual physicals and treated all the minor health issues that pop up in a young workforce.  He was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, always smiling, laughing and joking with his patients.  Doc and I had a special bond as we both shared a love for the water, boats, and Italian shoes (yes, Italian shoes).  Doc actually owned a large yacht and we often joked about me quitting my job and captaining his yacht as we sailed around the world.  Sometimes that seemed like a really good idea, especially when things weren’t all that rosy at home.  In the twilight of his career, Doc had it all.  I, on the other hand, was in the birthing stages of my career, competitive, aggressive, and ambitious.  I wanted to move up quickly, but the competition was fierce as each of our small group of fifteen had the same plan.  Naturally, this situation created a little stress; no, it created a lot of stress.  After a while, I began to experience sharp pain in my abdomen, similar to twisting a hot knife in my gut.  Often I would even throw up some kind of green bile.  I knew I had an ulcer, after all I was 28 years old.  I went to see the doc and informed him of my diagnosis, after which he laughed and slapped me on the back and told me I didn’t have an ulcer.  I insisted, however, and he reluctantly agreed to have the appropriate testing done.  When the test results came in, the doc called me to his office to review the results.  He explained that I did not have an ulcer and that the results were normal with the exception of a small inflamed muscle in my upper abdomen.  That, he said, is caused by stress.  What do you have to be stressed about?, he asked.  You’re young, healthy, and have a good job and a great family (that was not exactly true).  I tried to tell him about all of my problems, after which he laughed again (that laugh was beginning to bother me).  Look son, he said, there are only two kinds of problems in the world.  There are those you can solve and those you can’t.  Now, the ones you can solve, do it expeditiously, don’t procrastinate.  Those problems you can’t solve, forget them.  Worrying about them will only make you sick.  Well, naturally I thanked him for all his sage advice and walked away  thinking, Yeah doc, that’s easy for you to say, you have it all, even a yacht.  Naturally, the gut twisting pain continued.

About two months later, I came in to work on Monday morning and was informed by a co-worker that Doc Dillard had passed away over the weekend.  What, I exclaimed, what happened?  Well, he checked himself into the hospital on Friday and passed on Sunday.  Apparently, he had been suffering with cancer for several years and it finally got the best of him.  While grieving the loss of my friend, the memory of his lecture about the two kinds of problems came into my mind.  It occurred to me that his cancer had been one of those problems he couldn’t solve and he had put it aside and lived happily until the end.  How bad must it have been if he passed just two days after checking in?  The point of his lecture suddenly became very clear to me as I realized that he was actually living it.  Within a few short days, the pain in my abdomen disappeared never to return.  I took his advice to heart, ignoring the unsolvable problems and fixing those I could, although I occasionally procrastinate a bit in solving some of those fixable issues.

Some thirty years later, I met an old man at the feed store who, in retrospect, just might have been old Doc Dillard paying me a visit.  I was a rookie cattle raiser (40 acres and 10 cows does not a rancher make) and had lost a cow to lightning the night before. She had a week old calf and I was picking up all the stuff needed to bottle feed it.  As I walked up to the loading dock, an old man said, “good morning.”  Not too good,” I replied.  “Any day above ground is a good one,” he replied.  “Yeah, but I lost a cow in the storm last night.”  “Be glad you didn’t loose em all,” he said.  “But she had a week old calf that I’m now going to have to bottle feed.”  “Lucky it wasn’t one day old,” he said, “woulda been harder to save”.  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I replied.  As I drove home, I thought of the doc and his lecture and how it applied to the old man’s attitude.  When I got home, I observed that my orphan calf now had five stepmothers taking care of her.  She wound up being the biggest and fattest of the bunch.




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The wisdom in the above is priceless.


"Live hopefully. It does not matter what happens, what your circumstances are, you have something to connect with."
   Bearheart

Paloma

Energy of Thought and Stillness

"Thoughts are energy, and you can make your world or break your world by your thinking"
        Susan Taylor

We take for granted what our mind creates in the form of thoughts to make it through one day, one week, one month, one year.  The National Science Foundation determined that the average individual has 1,000 thoughts per hour. If the individual is writing they have per hour 2,500. The study then goes on to say that a deep thinker has up to 50,000 thoughts in a day. I throw these numbers out to stimulate appreciation of the energy that is produced from our brains and the thoughts we form.


Truly, it is endless energy that can be harnessed to create beauty or destruction. The key lies in the heart and determination of each person to decided the path.   We are our own best friends or our own worst enemies. 

The above leads me into another quote I like concerning stillness.

"Being still has been very liberating. I am better able to unhook, be present, not react, breathe. And maybe tomorrow I'll forget, but maybe I won't. "
   Alyssa S., yoga student 

For me I consider stillness, as a way to recharge my brain. Stillness in my definition, is not meditation. It is just sitting or standing and just listening to the sounds that surround me, observe what is in front of me with blank thought. No music, no iPhone, no book, nothing to the best of my control that would stimulate a reactive thought.  I am so found of my oasis of stillness, that my brain will generate the thought of it is time for some stillness, I am getting overload here, sister!!!!  

Stillness is a tool that I incorporate in my days as many times as I can. Be it at work or at home it is an oasis for myself and my future thoughts. 


Paloma




 

If You Could Play Only One Song...

Question:

If you could play only one song, from a jukebox containing an unlimited amount of songs...
What song would you pick?


Remember, only one song.


A good friend posed that question to me the other day over lunch.  I remember well my reaction, my eyes widened, my mouth flew open, and my mind flashed: easy question, easy question!!!  I went to answer, then I realized I could not answer. The question, that started out fun, turned hard. My mind then shifted into another gear,  I went to throw out an answer...

And he reminded me... Only one song, that is all you can pick.

I realized then my friend had posed to me a question that takes you to a level of deep introspection. It is a question you think you can easily answer, then like hitting a wall, you can not.
Memories began to flood in.
Periods of time envelope you, People, family, lovers, successes, failures, laughter, and tears....
Your life flashes before you as you contemplate a response.
  
I found myself trying to shift my left side of my brain into over drive to provide me with the "right" answer. I am a lover of music and this silly question and its simple, simple answer should be rolling off my tongue!
Yet I found myself wanting to pick a song that would benefit me the most ,with the least risk.

So now I really have two questions to answer.

If I could only pick one song to play, what would it be...

And....

What is the risk I am afraid of facing...

A simple, fun question blooming into true introspection.

So, tell me, what song would you pick?