Sunday, August 6, 2017

60 PLUS AND NOT HOLDING/A Mildew On The Mind


In seeking to name a real problem, yes...give it a name and recognize it...but don't frame it.

By way of example you may have had an accident or a heart attack and worked your way back to only 80% of your former abilities.  There is certainly no harm in plugging away at the last 20% unless you let it over-shadow your 80% success. But if eventually you learn you have come as far as you can, learn to live with...and picture a worst scenario.

Our mind can be called the secretary to our soul. It records if faith or doubt, courage or cowardice, persistence or pessimism resides there.  If we have done nothing but weep, worry and whine we have been busy sending the wrong messages. 

If we have been like children who blame chairs when they fall down or apple trees for rotten apples, we have been refusing responsibility.  If we constantly curse God or or fellow man or nature for our misfortunes, we are spinning negative wheels that will be increasingly mired and muddy.

We have all met people who act as if they had fried misery for breakfast and washed it down with a cup of complaint.  How much better for everyone if they had cultivated an emotionally beautiful flower garden rather than row after row of stink weeds.

Pure and smile, whether silver linings or nightmares are harvested in time of stress largely depends on which has been planted.

Worry can so easily get, and keep a grip on our souls.  We have to work at being glad of life because it's us the change to love and to work and to play, and to look up at the stars and be filed with wonder at what is beyond (to paraphrase Henry Van Dyke)

It is common sense to suggest that bad thoughts, like concrete, free flowing through our minds soon harden.

What do do?  Certainly as a part of positives,find a listening ear and talk a problem through.  

I remember one individual I once counseled saying, "I just want to cry and not talk about my problem.  It makes me feel better."

But after awhile it doesn't. Past a certain constant, prolonged weeping sends the soul the message that everything is out of control.

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