X appeared to be a difficult letter to get to grips with,  I toyed with other ‘x’ words but kept getting drawn back to xenophobia, an acute dislike of foreigners.

Not necessarily of other cultures, however.  We seem to be very tolerant of the cultures we like to embrace, whilst at the same time disliking the people from those cultures.

What we must realise is that we are all descended from the same source.  We are all inextricably linked by our ancestors, no matter what we may look like in our generation.

For the whole of eternity people have been transient, they have moved from coast to coast and if we were all able to trace our lines back far enough in time we would find those people we may fear now are our forefathers.

Xenophobes, you should be more afraid of someone exactly like you.

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Many people mistakenly feel that the only definition of ‘wealthy’ is having lots of possessions.  They believe that in order to be wealthy one must have lots of money and ‘things’.

To be truly wealthy you do not need money or possessions.  You can consider yourself a very wealthy person if you possess wisdom, peace of mind, friends and family, a lifestyle you are happy with, a spiritual awareness, a belief in oneself; any or all, and much much more, are attributes that enable you to consider yourself wealthy.

As Garth Brookes once said, ‘You are not wealthy until you have something that money cannot buy’.

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Do you believe that truth can do more harm than good? Oscar Wilde once said, ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple’.  And Denis Diderot, ‘We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter’.  Truth will out, as Shakespeare said.

Honesty is the best policy.  A frequently used phrase that was also actually written by William Shakespeare, and it continues, ‘If I lose mine honor, I lose myself’.

Thomas Jefferson said ‘Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom’, and Spencer Johnson: ‘Integrity is telling my self the truth, and honesty is telling the truth to others’.  We often sacrifice truth to our vanity, comfort or our advantage.

So, how honest are you, with yourself and with others?  Do you find it hard to be veracious?

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Being united brings about a better way of working.  Helping others helps yourself too.  As Helen Keller said, ‘Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much’.  And indeed much more can be achieved if we work in unity.

‘And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity’.  Ernst Toller

There is no problem that cannot be solved by working together.

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Last year I went to a choral concert held by a group raising money for a local charity.  I wrote about it in a previous post, If You Don’t Have A Go You’ll Never Know.

The charity they were raising money for is About With Friends, a group who give support to people with learning disabilities.

At the end of the concert the group said they were going to sing one more song and they invited some of the About With Friends group attending to join them.  The song was about tolerance and being non judgemental.  This is part of the song they all sang together:

Don’t judge me by the way I look;
Don’t judge me by the way I cook;
Don’t judge me by the way I walk;
Don’t judge me by the way I talk;
Don’t judge me by the things I do,
Because I do not judge you.

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Other words we could use in place of sagacious are: wise, sage, discerning, clever, intelligent, judicious, acute, sharp, keen, perspicacious.

Wisdom is not learned easily.

As Confucius said:

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

It takes time and experience to become wise; it also takes a recognition of the facts, seeing things as they are, rather than how you would like them to be.

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In our family we have a tradition, at 8pm every Christmas Day we toast absent friends.  This not only gives us the opportunity to keep those who have gone before us a part of what we do and very much in our minds during our celebrations, but also brings to mind those people who are still here but we may not think of all the time.

There are many people in our lives, all taking different roles and having different levels of importance.  We share our festivities mainly with our families, and our close friends share these occassions with their own families, but we can still include them in what we do by remembering.

Remembrance is important; it is important to remember those who have gone before us, but it is also as importnat to remember those who are still here who we may not see too often.

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In the quiet of the predawn hours The Hush
slips in to blanket the slumbering earth
upon life’s gentle breeze, it quietly blows in
its veil of serenity, imperceptibly dispersed

The Hush unfolds over the hilly terrain
climbing, spilling over the majestic mountaintops
guided by the loving arms of the branches of nature
The Hush settles over me, awakening my heart

Tranquil waves caress the shores of my skin
fluttering lashes, feeling the tickling of gray
lips part, kissed by the breath of peace
The Hush drapes my body in its elegant array
Tenderly bidden, I arise for my solitary tryst
barefoot upon the dew covered blades of grass
I wrap the arms of The Hush softly around me
and we sway together in our harmonious dance
Within the arms of The Hush,
draped in the silence of being
my heart, yet again, reborn
by Nature’s spiritual healing

http://www.quietpoetry.com/2010/10/hush.html

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If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

‘If’ – by Rudyard Kipling

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I love opportunities.  I grab them with both hands most of the time.  The ones I don’t take up are never ones I regret letting go.

Some of it comes from being a risk taker, I love life and am happy to explore it fully, but I don’t feel I am in any way cavalier in my attitudes towards it.  I just love new experiences and I love adventures!

Taking lots of small opportunities is often better than waiting for that great big one to come along, because it may not!

There’s a great saying by Harry Truman that I love:

‘A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties’.

Sometimes it is easy to spend so much time looking at the closed doors around you that you cannot see the one that has opened in front of you.

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