Count Your Blessings
If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things. — Albert Einstein
You have all heard the same advice before from many different people. To achieve your dreams you must set goals. In short you have to become a seer — a person who through supernatural insights can see the future. Every culture, throughout history, has sought knowledge of the future and practiced forms of divination. To set goals one must cast the mind forward into the future towards where they want to be. But how to determine the required steps? The process for obtaining material “wealth” are well established — you want a car or a house? You will need a down payment and probably have to borrow the rest against the future. But many people have peered into their future and seen they will never be able to own a house. So what are they to do?
There is a vital distinction between a house and a home. For many years, I lived in my grandparents old house. I was never allowed to purchase it from my Dad for various family-related reasons. And so I would tell my children their childhood home was our home but not our house. I was blessed to be able to raise my children there after an incredibly painful divorce. But my little family all had to leave in the end, because it was not our house. No one has lived there since my daughters moved out many year ago. They maintained and cleaned the place beautifully and left it spotless. Our home, where we made a million memories together, became nothing more than storage space for others in the family. The place has declined ever since. But the positive energy my children and I made there remains with us. Home is where the heart is, and our hearts are forever brightened by the beauty of our memories of the home we made together.
A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at. — Bruce Lee
Setting goals is a powerful tool for making positive changes in your life. Each and every one of us has done this. There is something in our lives which needs to be changed, and we set about trying to change that negative aspect. The goals we set are important up to a point, but it is the desire for change which is rewarded. The Universe will respond to your sincere efforts to change life for the better. Spiritual energy will illuminate the darkness ahead. When I studied philosophy, I thought the most frightening schools of thought were the ones which tried to negate the divine through logical “reasoning”. Imagine someone who desperately wants to be completely alone in the universe, who believes there is nothing more to life than what can be held in the hand or studied through “scientific methods”. The cold, clinical aspects of living that way scared me to my core. How can one hope to change if all you can rely on are logarithms and algorithms?
I am a slow walker, but I never walk back. — Abraham Lincoln. There has to be more incentive than statistical analysis to set your feet to moving. If we all relied on strictly linear thinking there would be no reason to “have faith in oneself”. A rational, reasonable person would look at statistics and understand they have an infinitesimal chance to become “wealthy”. Over SIXTY PERCENT of the world’s wealth is held by 1% of the world’s richest individuals. During the global pandemic when so much of the world was suffering, US billionaires’ wealth increased by 40%. The personal fortune of just three men in the US, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos is larger than the poorest half of America. So when you get your feet moving forward towards happiness, it is probably best not to set your goal as financial wealth.
Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal. — Rabindranath Tagore
When I was a little boy, I would look at the kids’ rooms on television and imagine what it would be like to have a bedroom that seemed as big as our entire home. I thought it would feel strange to have so much space to myself. I just wanted to be able to take ten steps without having to walk around something. My father, who worked the night shift in a factory, built the house we lived in more or less by himself. But it was my mother who made it a home. Mom, the daughter of a sharecropper/coal miner, took the meager financial means and wove it into a happy tapestry of life. She said we were her blessings. We had a safe and happy home from which to dream. When I became a Dad, I told my folks that my goal was for my kids to have a happy childhood. And I know, through all that happened growing up, my kids were happy overall. Today, the echoes of that happy home rest in our hearts and will never disappear.
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
No amount of divination will allow us to know how many days we have remaining. There can only be the hope that more of those days will be happy and matter not just to us but to others. Do not become angry at what you don’t have. Don’t envy wealthy people. See instead your own personal spiritual wealth. If your goal is to have a happy life, don’t count your money — count your blessings.
