THE INSPIRATION OF ROSE
The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn't already know. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.
I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being..
She said, 'Hi handsome. My name is Rose. I'm eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?'
I laughed and enthusiastically responded, 'Of course you may!' and she gave me a giant squeeze..
'Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?' I asked.
She jokingly replied, 'I'm here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids...'
'No seriously,' I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.
'I always dreamed of having a college education and now I'm getting one!' she told me.
After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake.
We became instant friends. Every day for the next three months we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this 'time machine' as she shared her wisdom and experience with me..
Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up.
At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet. I'll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor.
Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, 'I'm sorry I'm so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I'll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know.'
As we laughed she cleared her throat and began, ' We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.
There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humor every day. You've got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die.
We have so many people walking around who are dead and don't even know it!
There is a huge difference between growing older and growing up.
If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don't do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight.
Anybody! Can grow older. That doesn't take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change. Have no regrets.
The elderly usually don't have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with regrets..'
She concluded her speech by courageously singing 'The Rose.'
She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives. At the year's end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those months ago.
One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep.
Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it's never too late to be all you can possibly be.
These words have been passed along in loving memory of ROSE.
REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL. We make a Living by what we get. We make a Life by what we give.
God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage. If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it.
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930's 1940's, 50's, 60's and early 70's !
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos...
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead
based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos.
Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on a Sunday, somehow we didn't starve to death!
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers,
Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because.....
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O..K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY ,
no video/dvd films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
Lawsuits from these accidents.
Only girls had pierced ears!
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time...
We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet because we didn't need to keep up with the Jones!
MERIT
Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and throw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we werent concentrating ...
We can string sentences together and spell and have proper conversations because of a good, solid three R's education.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
Our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade' and 'Ridge' and 'Vanilla'
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO
DEAL WITH IT ALL !
And YOU may have been one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!
PS -The big type is because your eyes are not too good at our age anymore
Are you sitting down? Okay, here's the bombshell. In just FOUR DAYS, the volcanic eruption in Iceland, since its' first spewing of volcanic ash, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet - all of us.
Of course you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress - it’s that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans and all animal life.
I know, it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of: driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kid's "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, holidays at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your 50 cent light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs ...well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just four days.
The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in just FOUR DAYS by that volcano in Iceland , has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud out at any one time - EVERY DAY.
I don't really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire time on earth. Yes folks, Mt Pinatubo was active for over one year - think about it.
Of course I shouldn't spoil this touchy-feely tree-hugging moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well recognised 800 year global heating and cooling cycles, which keep happening, despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change. I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud, but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years...and it happens every year.
Just remember that our government is trying to impose a whopping carbon tax on you on the basis of the bogus “human-caused” climate change scenario. Hey, isn’t it interesting how they don’t mention “Global Warming” any more, but just “Climate Change” - you know why? It’s because the planet has COOLED by 0.7 degrees in the past century and these global warming bull artists got caught with their pants down.
Just keep in mind that you might yet have an Emissions Trading Scheme - that whopping new tax - imposed on you, that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer. It won’t stop any volcanoes from erupting, that’s for sure.
Pass The Butter .. Please .
True or False !!
This is interesting . .. ...
Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back.
It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow colouring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavourings. ...
DO YOU KNOW.. The difference between margarine and butter?
Read on to the end...gets very interesting!
Both have the same amount of calories.
Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams; compared to 5 grams for margarine.
Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over
Eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard
Medical Study.
Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.
Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few and only because they are added!
Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavours of other foods.
Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been
Around for less than 100 years .
And now, for Margarine..
Very High in Trans fatty acids .
Triples risk of coronary heart disease .
Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)
Increases the risk of cancers up to five times.....
Lowers quality of breast milk.
Decreases immune response.
Decreases insulin response.
And here's the most disturbing fact.... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!
Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC... And shares 27 ingredients with PAINT
These facts alone were enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is
Added, changing the molecular structure of the substance).
You can try this yourself:
Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it open in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will notice a couple of things:
* no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)
* it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value ; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow.
Why? Because it is nearly plastic . Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?
Share This With Your Friends..... (If you want to butter them up')!
Chinese Proverb: When someone shares something of value with you and you benefit from it, you have a moral obligation to share it with others.
Pass the BUTTER PLEASE
Tapping is the Key to the Secret
The Secret is a revolutionary Self-Improvement DVD sweeping the planet, that explains how our thoughts create our reality. Tapping is a powerful acupressure technique that eliminates negativity. Using them together you can literally achieve anything you want.
The Secret is the Law of Attraction. It says that thoughts become things, whether they are negative or positive thoughts. We are always creating our reality, whether we know it or not. It's just that as often as we create what we want - positive thoughts, we also create what we don't want - negative thoughts.
Tapping is a meditation/self-hypnosis technique that helps you let go of negative thoughts and feelings. Every negative thought has a feeling attached to it. That feeling is an imbalance in your body's nervous system. You tap various acupressure points on your body to release that feeling, and the negative thought starts to change.
Whatever positive thought you try to focus on, negative thoughts jump up to get in the way. This is due to the body's survival mechanism being over-enthusiastic about it's job. Based on past experience, it perceives danger in what you are wanting to do. It's warning you that the last time you did something even remotely similar, it resulted in feeling bad - so it brings up the negative feelings ahead of time to make sure you don't do it. Negative feelings lead directly to negative thoughts.
The survival mechanism is doing its job, but a little bit too well - it gets confused with the complexities of modern life, and starts matching situations to past experiences that aren't really relevant, and bringing up feelings of danger when there are none.
Tapping literally removes the feeling attached to the past experience. That way the irrelevant warning feelings don't come up, and you don't think negative thoughts, and it becomes much easier to hold a positive mental picture of what you want, and take appropriate action.
This is extremely powerful - Tapping is the Key to the Secret.
How to Do Anything
This is simplified from The Secret, and also inspired by The Science of Getting Rich:
- Make a PICTURE of what you want
- Take the FIRST STEP towards making it happen
When you think about it, we follow this process to do anything, whether it's making a cup of tea or building a skyscraper. For big tasks we often chunk it down and make mental pictures of various milestones along the way, but this is just a detail.
So why does this process fail?... Negative thoughts, of course!
When we go to take that first step, that's when most negative feelings come up. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of what other people might think, fear of it just being hard work. Our sub-conscious mind is reminded of a previous time when we took a similar step and it ended badly. So naturally it's bound to warn you not to do that again... even though this time it's a totally different situation.
The feeling comes up, and we rationalise it with negative thoughts. We talk ourselves out of what it is we want to do, and go and watch television instead, or smoke a cigarette, or eat, or drink, or maybe just lie down and stare at the ceiling, wondering why we are such a failure.
The other option is to Tap away the feeling. Work out at which point the feeling was the strongest, and what that feeling reminds you of - when have you felt it before? When you find the first time, use Tapping to wipe the slate clean. Then take that next step again, and find that it's effortless to do so.
When you think about your mental picture, of when you've got where you want to be - what does it feel like to be there? Hopefully it feels pretty good... But maybe there are negative feelings lurking beneath the good feelings. Jump right into the picture, and look for fears, worries, self-doubts. What's the worst that could happen in that picture?
If there are any negative feelings in that picture, then guess what... your sub-conscious mind will find ways to avoid it. It will sabotage you, probably by convincing you that the next step you want to take is one that will actually take you further from your goal.
So tap away any negative feelings you find in your mental picture. The positive feelings that are there are your motivation to get there, positive feelings can't be tapped anyway. But underneath those, find each negative feeling, trace it back to find when you first felt it, and tap away the feelings stored in that memory.
If you apply this process repeatedly and thoroughly, all negative thoughts relating to your goals are vanquished. You can literally do anything you want.
