Saturday, June 23, 2012

THE GOOD LIFE REVISITED



LIFE IS GOOD!  Believe that with your whole heart.  Be good!  Life is better if you are a positive participant, adding to it not taking away from it.  Being good doesn't just mean obeying your parents and teachers or the law or even the ten commandments.  It means helping when you can help, giving when you can give, sharing when you can share, loving when you can love.  Do these things and I guarantee you will enjoy your life. 
    
 I wrote the  preceding paragraph in my first blog entry and then quickly went on to get some of my other thoughts down before they could get away.  “Life is good” is worth spending a lot more time on.
  
 Too many people I have known seem to live their life with the premise that, “life would be good if only….”  The surest way to be unhappy is to be convinced you could be happy if you just had more.  This brings me to something I sometimes use in recovery meetings, I title it “The Richest Man I know.”
  
 My dad, your great-grandfather, worked as a tenant farmer for much of his adult life.  This is not a job which brings in a lot of money;  I believe at one time his salary was one hundred dollars a month.  When he was in his mid-fifties, he quit farming and took over managing a gas station, a job he kept doing until he was at least seventy years old.  He and my mother had purchased a small house in town when he left farming and they lived there the rest of their lives.  His car (they had only one) was a modest sedan; they didn’t own a boat or a camper or a vacation home.  When they traveled it was to visit family;  they didn’t take cruises or “see the world.”  He watched sports on tv and fixed bikes for the neighborhood children.  He liked visiting with the neighbors and talking to his siblings and his sons on the phone.  This is just about the sum total of the things in his life, but he was the richest man I know.  I give him that title, because I have never met anyone who was more content with what he had.  A bigger better house or fancier car would have been wasted on him.  The best meal he ever ate was Mother’s cooking.  His life was complete; he had everything he wanted.  It is impossible to be richer than that.   I am now close to bestowing that title on myself.  There is little I want in this life that I do not have.  I love the home I have.  It is filled with family pictures and dogs and movies and books and I wake up in it every morning loving, and being loved by, your grandmother.  I don’t know what more I could ask for.  I hope that you can also be “the richest man in the world.”  It’s a great thing to be.

Grandma’sBriefs.com

2 comments:

  1. Such a moving and love-filled post. I love this. We so often strive for more, more, more... when all we need is right in front of us, in the faces of those we love. Thank you so much for linking this to the GRAND Social. ♥

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  2. Life really is good! Yes, it would be nice if we had a big screen TV. There are lots of "things" it would be nice to have but -- Life is Good! I have a wonderful husband and 3 cats that we share our home with. My daughter and her wonderful husband and our awesome grandchild only live one mile away and we all like each other! I am so much happier than I ever dreamed possible. Life is Good! Just stopping by from the GRAND Social Linky Party. Thanks for sharing!

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