How to Be Your Own Best
Friend
Stream of Consciousness 2002
I am still clearing away a lot
stuff. When you move into an apartment
that is less than forty square meters, you have too. Actually it is a blessing to have to take a look
at everything and ask if you really have room for it in your life. Heinlein, Asimov and
Bradbury. I love Robert Schuller. His lists
are wondrously designed to teach and motivate while using mnemonic devises of
alliteration and rhyming. All the hard
backs are gone. I have kept "Tough
Times Never Last But Tough People Do" in
paperback. At one time I had the
"whole enchilada" but Wayne Dyer is just one book away from being
gone. "Seeds of Greatness" by
Dennis Waitley just about went into the "recycle
box" but looking through it I realized I had never read it, and it
actually deserves the time. One line out of "Seeds" that caught my
attention as I was glancing through it was "You are what you
watch." Do you remember in Bradbury's "451"
how people became the books that were to be destroyed by fire? I have become all the books I have read! They are still there. All those John Norman books are still there
even though they are gone from the shelves.
I am sorry they went back to the used book store where they had the
chance to pollute someone else's mind.
If you have trash like that, do the fireman thing with them. Okay?
I came from a family of book collectors. My dad's mother was a school teacher and
collected books when they were much more expensive. There was a "self help" book that
belonged to my grandfather with his name in the front and his pencil
underlining and margin notes. It was a
quality binding but a poor book. As I
analyzed that grandpa had bought it used and had most likely only read it once,
I was able to let it go. The Emerson's
Essays was a gift to him from grandma before they were married. It was at one time a pretty book in green
padded leather, but the paper was poor quality and the binding weak. I will keep it for sentimental reasons. The paper bound one I bought to read instead
is out of quality paper and will most likely outlast it. It has been hard to deal with all of dad's
books. I have tried to find homes for
most of them. Uncle Paul got his
children's book back the day of dad's funeral.
He hadn't seen it for sixty years.
Somehow we ended up with it when grandma's books were cleared out
possibly because I was of the right age to read it. My aunt Emma is a writer. Writers write because they have to
write. They will write with goal of
getting published, but will continue to write even if they never do. Well, we had two huge anthologies that I
couldn't throw away. Each had one poem
by aunt Emma. Gifts from Auntie Em. I had to bribe my sister into taking
them. She really wanted to have the
family history book, a big book of genealogy and pictures of ancestors, aunts
and uncles, and first and second and third and fourth cousins. She had to take the anthologies to get the
history.
So, what books will I keep? Napoleon Hill's "Grow Rich with Peace of
Mind" for one. In many ways it is
better than "Think and Grow Rich" because it is looking back through
a lifetime of experience. I guess the way
to decide is to determine which books have made an impact on me and also which
books I wish to continue to influence my life.
Some books I had duplicates of, and usually I kept the old tattered copy
and gave away the good one. An example
of that is "How to Be Your Own Best Friend." "Friend" is a friend and has
nearly as much of my writing in it as the authors'.
I was sharing with a co-worker about how good
"How to Be Your Own Best Friend" was.
I had pulled it out of my lunch box and was reading it. He was from
Quotes
from "How to Be Your Own Best Friend"
They expect happiness to happen to them. They don't see it's something they have to do.
We speak as if our feelings change from sunny to
stormy like the weather, over which we have no control. This meteorological view of our emotions is
very useful; it take us off the hook for the way we feel.
First, you have to make a very basic decision:
do you want to lift yourself up of put yourself down? Are you for yourself or against yourself?
Do the things that make you feel good about yourself.
Doing what make you feel good about yourself is
really the opposite of self indulgence.
. . . Self indulgence means satisfying the smallest part of you, and
that only temporarily.
Self denial is one of the worst kinds of self
indulgence. It is feeding the part of
you that feels worthless.
. . . if people want to
see themselves as unable to do something, they manage to forget the times they
have actually done it.
You may have to sit yourself down and demand
some answers. Why do you go on being
unkind and unfriendly to yourself? Why
do you trip yourself up? What are you
getting out of it? What kind of vision of yourself are you holding on to? Do you think that if you act helpless enough
someone will come and take over for you?
Do you think that failure will make you lovable?
It is important to learn to listen to
ourselves. Most of us learn to tune
ourselves out.
One reason analysis sometimes takes so long is
the refusal of many people to realize that, at bottom, change is up to them.
It is not enough to want to change. You must want to want to. You must want to even when you don't want to.
We are told to hate the sin and love the sinner,
but we are too apt to twist it around the other way. We hate the sinner in us and cling to the
sin.
Richard