You Know Better Than That

 “Books are old fashioned,” my eight-year-old grandson told me this morning.

That hurt my heart.

I think of #Ray Bradbury’s book #Fahrenheit 451 where books were burned and how the people each memorized one book to keep it alive.

This past Thursday National Achiever’s Congress, the presenter, Michael Burnett, told a similar story.

When Nelson Mandela was in prison, the prisoners had to do hard labor, and that was to break up sandstone rocks. Sunlight on sandstone creates quite a glare, and it is hard on the eyes. Mandela asked the guard if they could have sunglasses to shield their eyes.

You know the answer. “No.”

Later on, when they had nothing to do in their cell, Mandela asked the guard if they could have books to read.

“You aren’t here to have sunglasses and books,” he said. The answer was, “No.”

So the prisoners devised a plan. They would have a one on one, each sharing what they knew with the other, and thus when they were, at last, released from prison,  each was smarter than when they entered it.

We are all living books filled with experiences, insights, and garnered wisdom. If we shared it, just think where we would be.  I guess that’s what the internet is, but I still want books.

We have this extraordinary quality of desiring to create beauty,  love and learning around us, but with our two-million-year-old brains—evolutionarily speaking—we are, instead, on the watch for danger. There are fears all around us, internal and external. We hang back, afraid to go for our dreams, afraid to go into uncharted territory, afraid to speak up, and afraid of our own shadows. We often think, we aren’t good enough, loved enough, or smart enough.

You know better than that.

If you agree, laugh out loud.  If not, keep quiet.

High five,

Joyce

P.S. The Peacock is back:

There must be one feather that is in focus. I was in a hurry to catch him, I had to show you that my totem animal is real. After two months of a no show, he appeared yesterday. He drove Layfette (that’s one dog) crazy.

Hello Awesome!

For you.

"What would you name your dog?" Eight-year-old grandson called to us from the car's back seat.

 "I'd name mine Naked," he said, "that way when we had a party I could say, "I'm going outside to get Naked."

An hour and a half later I stood inches from a glass wall watching silver fish doing an endless Ester Williams pretend.

Fish by the thousands swished past the window, swimming in unison, circling their enormous tank. A shark swam into the mass of fingerlings--no problem—they glided aside, then elegant as silk, flowed back into formation.

Another shark swam through a hole the fish had created. They closed the gap with the same precision. A dimensional tunnel came next.

I was mesmerized.

They had it right in the movie, "Finding Dory." Schools of fish could probably spell.

We were visiting the Oregon Aquarium in Newport Beach Oregon. A must see if you are ever in Oregon. It is exquisite, the best I have ever seen, and I have visited a few.

All the aquatic animals at the Aquarium were vibrant and healthy.  corals were abundant, anemones large as dinner plates, starfishes with "eyes" on the tips of their "arms"—I didn't know that—water clear as glass and cold as ice.

See, we were traveling.

Now we're back home.

It's been a busy two months. With Christmas behind us, New's Year's day, done, five family birthdays in January and February, done, new house moved into, its gray bathroom, gone, transformed into mango and lime green, the dark green dining room and gray living room doused in cream-colored paint.

Daughter painted the fireplace white; I painted walls and myself.

My little Fixer Upper:

Bath Room before:

Bath Room after:

























The house isn't sad anymore.

But I have noticed that a lot of people are…

Why is that?

They don't know how awesome they are. See, like my grandson, I answer my own question.

To read more, go to www.traveling-thru-life.com It is only a click away. What if an abundant life was only a click away?