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Health & Fitness

Believe In Your Heart And Your Potential

Believe in your heart that something wonderful is about to happen. Love your life. Believe in your own powers in your own potential and in your own goodness." These are not my words, but indeed powerful. Wake up every morning with the awe of just being alive. Live this day well. This is an excellent philosophy on life, not that I always adhere to everything I write. I will start right now to listen to myself and to respect, follow and be faithful to all the words I write about in these columns.

I had an uncle, his name was Julius. He was Mom’s brother, a few years older than her. He was a very quiet man, he did not talk much when we had family dinners or parties. I liked him when I was a kid because he was quiet and he did not comment on things that kids were not interested in.When he and his wife Adele argued, he walked out of the house, did not talk back to her, and he walked around the neighborhood for an hour or so, came back home and just acted like nothing had occurred. She wanted to continue on the quarrel, he would go out again and walk again. By the time he came back the second time, she was so happy to see him, she was doing fine. When men started to wear wedding bands in about 1949, he was one of the first to buy one so everyone knew he was married which most men did at that time. My Dad had been married by then to Mom for about almost twenty-five years and he did not believe in them, so he did not get one. He wore on his pinky finger her high school ring. This was fine for him and his thoughts on wedding bands.

Dad loved life and he could have been the author of the above quotation I picked up on the Internet. He always thought today was great, tomorrow would be better and the next days (plural) would be exceptional. I as a kid often wondered why he had this philosophy because we did not have fancy things or objects; but even as a young person, I admired his thoughts on life and still do. He got such pleasure from really insignificant things that it was delightful.

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If Mom made any dinner, he was so grateful for her work cooking it, he would say every night “Lea, this is delicious and extra tasty.” She was happy she pleased him and when she baked something every Friday, he would taste it and smack his lips in thinking it a gourmet item and believe me in those days, the word gourmet was not even known. She was an excellent cook and baker and even though money was so limited in the forties and fifties, she made delicious food for us.

The interesting thing was that he took such pleasure in eating it and sitting at the table with us all together each night. He would not start to take a bite unless we all were sitting there and eating together. We ate faster as kids will do, but we most of the time sat there as he who ate slower was still eating. As we got older, we did leave the table because we had lots of homework to do and in those days, everything was handwritten for our nightly home assignments. We did not own a typewriter and of course, there were no cellphones to converse with your friends or computers.

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We were one of the fortunate ones who had a phone to ourselves because many of the neighbors had what were called party line phones. In order to save about two dollars a month, people had the party lines which meant your number was Madison 2345 J and your neighbor around the corner had the same number of Madison 2345K. This meant that when it rang once it was for you and if it rang twice it was for your neighbor. If you picked up the phone and it was for them, you heard the whole conversation of others.

 We had that originally and when a neighbor told Dad that she heard my brother’s conversation with a girlfriend, Dad said no more and we indulged in  getting our own single line for us where you did not share a line with others. We said thank you Dad for this wonderful thing as having no sharing with nosy strangers. Oh how rich we felt that day.

 Simple things that anyone reading this from these now generations will think us silly when they see this phone episode of our lives was so important and fantastic to us. My friends thought we had won the lottery when they heard we had our own line as it was called then. Of course, there was no lottery then too.

If we had our own radio in our own bedroom, we thought us surely on the way to being rich. There was a huge cabinet, good wood with a radio in it and it sat in the living room where we gathered to LISTEN TO IT AS A FAMILY.

As we aged, we had our own small radio in our bedroom and we could listen to stories on there or to music by our self.

As I write all of this, I feel like I lived in the Middle Ages, way back when, in pre television days, in pre everything, everyone owned one auto  and in pre cellphone or DVD days.

Let me tell you the truth, I knew others in the accelerated junior high I went to (this school for the smart teens from all over the city who were selected for their academics) to attend there and they were quite well to do, lots of them. They wore to school cashmere sweaters (no designer named clothing then) and Mouton Lamb coats on the weekend which was a bit much for a teen gal too.

However, that was OK because I had nice clothes, not of that expense, but stylish for the time and I looked fine. I did not envy their clothing because I felt ‘rich’ from the single phone line adventure and that was enough for then. I had books and records and a record player and good parents and a nice home and I was satisfied.

I knew that someday, some wonderful things would happen to me when I got older and I truly believed in my own powers and in my own goodness as a person and things would be greater in my older life.

I was right, they all happened, first with an excellent job out in the business world where I earned a nice amount of a salary for a young person at that time and age and I was able to purchase anything I desired and I was able to pay for it with a check or cash, no charge accounts too prevalent then.

 I was able to help my parents some in those days with buying them some things they would have not bought or spent money for and to send Mom to the beauty salon every week which made her so happy. Those charges were about five dollars which was a lot of money when you did not have it to spare and for her to have every other week a cleaning person to help with the house chores.

 He was a man named Beryl, tall and strong and she had him every other Friday and his other Friday, he went to my brother’s mother-in-law. They shared him and Mom and the other woman were so delighted to have household assistance. He did all the hard cleaning and he could reach heights for dusting and washing things without a ladder because of his height. Mom was so delighted that I paid his money every other Friday of the huge sum of five dollars. I was so happy because it made the chores lighter for her and I could afford to give back some for all the love she and Dad gave to me.

So as the saying on the Internet said “in your heart believe that something wonderful is about to happen and love your life. Believe in your own powers and potential” because you are powerful in mind and thought.

When I worked, the boss told my husband after I was married and I had left the position and we met him at a social gathering and computers had just come into the glory of home and business. He said “Elita had the mind of a computer, long before they were invented.”

 

So if that was true, it was because I knew in my heart way back when I was a kid, that something  splendid was about to happen some day and I knew I had the power to make it become  a reality.

Always believe in yourself and your powers and potential, even if you are a senior now and realize that every day is a gift. Remember too at any given moment, you have the ability to say this is not how the story is going to end. Say to yourself, this is how it will begin.            

 

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