Author: James Browning

Always Worth Living

/ James Browning

Even though I try not to, I find myself at times wishing for the “good old days”. Yet I know they were not nearly as good as my memory has enshrined them to be. It’s my mind’s way of coping to embellish the days gone by. Sometimes the ‘bad’ is made bigger in retrospect and the good is grown “larger” by memory. One of the gifts of getting older is a growing ability to let past happiness and joy expand while allowing difficulty and sadness to diminish slowly over time.

Taken from “The New Days” by Edgar Guest

The old days, the old days, how oft the poets sing,
The days of hope at dewy morn, the days of early spring,
The days when every mead was fair, and every heart was true,
And every maiden wore a smile, and every sky was blue
The days when dreams were golden and every night brought rest,
The old, old days of youth and love, the days they say were best.

The new days, the new days, of them I want to sing,
The new days with the fancies and the golden dreams they bring;
The old days had their pleasures, but likewise have the new
The gardens with their roses and the meadows bright with dew;
We love to-day the selfsame way they loved in days of old;
The world is bathed in beauty and it isn’t growing cold;
There’s joy for us a-plenty, there are tasks for us to do,
And life is worth the living, for the friends we know are true.

I am grateful for every day of my life: even the most difficult ones. Each one was filled with twenty-four hours of breath and life that I had the gift of life within. Even at their worst, my days been interesting, instructive and always worth living.

Enjoy yourself.
These are the good old days
you’re going to miss in the years ahead.
Unknown

I am Right Here

/ James Browning

Taken from “Finding Your Real Self” by Kathleen D. Cone

Hi,
It is me,
I am here,
Right inside of you,
and, although
You don’t know me
Very well,
Quite yet,
Time is on our side
and the days will grow longer,
The times together stronger.

We are friends,
and I’m here
Where I’ve always been.

You are light,
You are joy,
You are kindness beyond measure.

I am the child in you.

The purest part of me is you, the little boy who lives within. You are filled with an innocent joy for being alive and have never lost your sense wonder and adventure. For as long as my memories go back you have been with me and we have witnessed together a broad scope of the experiences of life. I know you have been scared at times and upset at others. We have shared wonderful moments of happiness. We’ve gone through a lot of sadness and heartbreak too. Even though I misplace my spark for life sometimes, you never lose your abundant joy for being alive.

I am deeply grateful for the little boy inside, the child within, who reminds me what true and honest feelings are, how beneficial hope and simple joy can be and how much fun playing is!

You will find more happiness
growing down than up.
Author Unknown

A Little, Delightful Surprise

/ James Browning

Over time Asian food has become a favorite and I’m especially fond of spicy Thai dishes that make my taste buds dance. I have come to know the quality of a particular restaurant’s Pad Thai is a good test of how tasty their full range of dishes is likely to be.

My most recent visit to my current favorite restaurant, Bamboo Thai Bistro, ended with a traditional fortune cookie that said Forgive the action, forget the intent. I save fortune cookie messages I like and added this one to the little box I keep them in where the following ten message are also to be found.

– Life is not a problem to be solved. It’s a mystery to be lived.
– You are a lover of words, someday you will write a book.
– Stop procrastinating, starting tomorrow.
– When you are squeezed, what comes out is what is inside.
– The fortune you seek is in another cookie.
– Body Mind and Spirit are one.
– Help me! I am a prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory.
– Time is not measured by clock, but by moments.
– The first step in making a dream come true is to wake up.
– Ignore previous cookie.

Some fortune cookie traditions I have heard are:
– The cookie must be eaten for the fortune to come true.
– The fortune must be read before any of the cookie is consumed or it won’t come true.
– The fortune must be read aloud to come true.
– The cookie must be chosen with your eyes closed.
– The traditional cookie is made of flour, sugar and milk with a little butter and vanilla.

Some fortune cookie messages have suggested lottery numbers printed on them and at least in one case they were great suggestions. On March 30, 2005, there were an unprecedented 110 second-place winners of the Powerball lottery, all of whom had played the numbers they got in a fortune cookie. The total payout came to $19.4 million with 89 tickets winning $100,000 and 21 additional tickets winning $500,000 due to the Power Play multiplier option.

I am grateful for the wonderful food at the establishments that with the check deliver fortune cookies with a little delightful surprise inside.

That man is the richest
whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Thoreau

Pictorial Expressions of Gratitude

/ James Browning

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then here are 10,000 words to express my gratitude this morning.

    

 

 

  

   

  

    

 

As I discovered these images each one provoked a positive emotion within: one of gratitude for life; for the ability to see, feel, hear, touch and smell. I hope they bring you a similar sense of awe, beauty and thankfulness.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet
and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran

Through Their Eyes

/ James Browning

Rudyard Kipling passed away just short of twenty years before I was born.  As a kid I loved the wonderful mental journeys I took reading the stories in “The Jungle Book” and the great adventures I went on with “Kim” and “Captains Courageous”. I didn’t discover Kipling’s poetry until well into adulthood and admittedly haven’t laid eyes on any of it in years. So when I came across “If” by Kipling it was an enjoyable reminder of what I aspired to be as a child and in some manner succeeded in being here and there.

“If” by Rudyard Kipling
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 imposters 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!

For all the writers who have inspired me, and yet will, with their poetry, novels and thoughts in word of all sorts, I am extraordinarily grateful.  Through their eyes I have witnessed a world for beyond any I could have known without their work. 

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say,
but what we are unable to say.
Anaïs Nin

What the Mind is Prepared to Comprehend

/ James Browning

…to understand the dream, is to know what a dream is made of.
What it is made of is simple: Thought.
To understand thought, and its relationship to dreams
is to understand the Dreamer.
You are the Dreamer.
This is your dream.
But do you realize it…?
Written in 2003 on physicsforums.com by “TheDreamer”

My concept of reality is how I personally perceive all that I sense and nothing else. No one sees or has even seen the world and what it contains exactly as I do. My philosophic mind knows that is a completely accurate statement, while my ego argues with me even as I type. It tells me some people have a more realistic view of the world than others and declares to me it is one of them. There is no way to prove or disprove my ego’s stance and it absolutely does not matter. My ego distorts everything! So I assume it is always twisting its view either a little or a lot.

Some perceptions do fit in the world of man better than others but that proves nothing. Just because people agree does not make what is perceived true or accurate.

We all know we humans have five senses only. We use our five senses to observe the world. We call that the physical world and declare arrogantly that non-physical beings don’t exist at all. That’s similar to an earthworm that’s blind declaring light do not exist. (by physicskid from the same forum mentioned above)

A human’s sight only takes in a certain range of color and needs light to be bright enough to see things. We consider light to be the combination of colors we can see: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. But that is just a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

There is a minimum volume or loudness of a sound that most people can hear. Just as light is a spectrum of wavelengths, so is sound. Human ears have a limited range of wavelengths or pitches they can detect. When something barely touches your skin, you may not detect it or feel it like when a mosquito lands on your skin. And there are only certain chemicals and molecules that we can taste or smell.  All are only perceptions and nothing else.

As I move into my day, I will try to keep these thoughts present in my mind. They tell me that when I see things differently than another it does not make them wrong and me right. It simply means we perceive things differently. I am grateful for the reminder of this basic truth this morning.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies

Most Easily Understood

/ James Browning

What often passes as general consensus is that the most meaningful thoughts of wisdom usually are filled with a good quantity of words, flowery expression and clever use of language. However, there are times a thought becomes striking in its simplicity, as I believe the four sayings below exemplify.

What’s done is done.
William Shakespeare

Turn your wounds into wisdom.
Oprah Winfrey

The best mind-altering drug is truth.
Lily Tomlin

My gratitude is sizeable for those who have the ability to boil down what they are saying into a small kernel of few words that are easily understood. Without the weight of layers and layers of vocabulary one’s intent is most easily understood.

The best things in life aren’t things.
Art Buchwald

Trail Markers

/ James Browning

A definition of a “saying” is: a short grouping of words that together make a clever or meaningful expression which usually contains advice, wisdom or expresses an obvious truth. For me sayings are much like markers on a trail that help me keep on the life path I want my feet to stay on.

This morning in meditating on ‘character’ I pondered the following three “trail markers” and wanted to share them:

You can tell the character of every man
when you see how he receives praise.
Seneca

You can easily judge the character of a man
by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wisdom is knowing what to do next,
skill is knowing how to do it,
and virtue is doing it.
David Starr Jordan

A thought from each of three different men from three different times: one from a philosopher of 2000 years ago (Seneca), another from a philosopher close to 300 years past (Goethe) and another saying from a man who lived within the last 100 years (Jordan). All three reach through time to express timeless wisdom to me about being a good man. I am grateful for what each one left behind to inspire me today.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us
to be what we know we could be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Letter To My Son on Father’s Day

/ James Browning

ORIGINALLY Posted on June 19, 2011

Dear Nick,

Vivid in memory are the emotions I experienced just after you were born. The day after you arrived I wrote in a journal about the joy I felt, the gratefulness within for you being ‘normal” with the proper number of fingers and toes, the awe that filled me for life and the hopes I had for you. I described your birth as “the most incredible thing I’ve ever witnessed” and also wrote “No child could be more wanted or more loved.” Those thoughts have aged sweeter as time has clicked by.

Frequent have been musings of how I could have been a better Father. Had I not chased with such vigor the emptiness of dysfunctional illusion, success and money I could have been there for you more. There were too many of your games I missed,weekend outings that never were and small events at school that were big happenings for you when my presence was missing. I never did build the treehouse I promised you.

Your Mother and I went our separate ways when you were sixteen which took you hundreds of miles away. One of my deepest regrets is your high school years when seeing you only every couple of months I became a sideline spectator of your life. Yet, as I mature and learn I have come to know regrets past making sure you aware of them, have no good purpose.

There are so many wonderful memories I have of your growing up. No child has ever been more curious about the world than you. You never crawled and began to recklessly walk at 7 months old. Such determination you have always had!

In school you did well and had the respect of most of your teachers. You made good friends and some of those relationships are healthy and thriving today. The only time you ever really got in trouble at school was through protecting a friend from a bully. How the game of hockey worked when you started to play at seven was unknown to me, but no father was ever prouder than I was to watch you. The lessons that came at you in college were hard ones, but you learned from your mistakes. I can not begin to express my admiration for your determination and stick-to-it-ness to get the education you wanted.

On this father’s day I hope these borrowed words express clearly to you the feelings of my heart and the wishes of my soul.

Until you have a son of your own… You will never know the joy beyond joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. You will never know the sense of honor that makes a man want to be more than he is and to pass on something good and useful into the hands of his son. And you will never know the heartbreak of the fathers who are haunted by the personal demons that keep them from being the men they want their sons to see.

We live in a time when it is hard to speak from the heart. Our lives are smothered by a thousand trivialities, and the poetry of our spirits is silenced by the thoughts and cares of daily affairs.

And so, I want to speak to you honestly. I do not have answers. But I do understand the questions. I see you struggling and discovering and striving upward, and I see myself reflected in your eyes and in your days. In some deep and fundamental way, I have been there and I want to share.

I, too, have learned to walk, to run, to fall. I have had a first love. I have known fear and anger and sadness. My heart has been broken and I have known moments when the hand of God seemed to be on my shoulder. I have wept tears of sorrow and tears of joy.

There have been times of darkness when I thought I would never see light again, and there have been times when I wanted to dance and sing and hug every person I met.

I have felt myself emptied into the mystery of the universe, and I have had moments when the smallest slight threw me into rage.

I have carried others when I barely had the strength to walk myself, and I have left others standing by the road with their hands out stretched for help.

Sometimes I feel I have done more than anyone can ask; other times I feel I am a charlatan and a failure. I carry within me the spark of greatness and the darkness of heartless crimes.

In short, I am a man, as are you.

Although you will walk your own earth and move through your own time, the same sun will rise on you that rose on me, and the same reasons will course across your life as moved across mine. We will always be different, but we will always be the same.

This is my attempt to give you the lesson of my life, so that you can use them in yours. They are not meant to make you into me. It is my greatest joy to watch you turn into yourself.

To be your father is the greatest honor I have ever received. It allowed me to touch mystery and to see my love made flesh. If I could but have one wish, it would be for you to pass that love along.

I love you,

Pops

You are my son-shine.
Author Unknown

A Beautiful Soul

/ James Browning

The thought-provoking images with a message below were found on a blog on tumblr.com called “life is a beautiful struggle”:

 

Sometimes running across what others have placed on their blog has more meaning to me at that moment that any other thing I know of or could write myself.  A beautiful soul keeps the blog I borrowed the above from and has my sincere gratitude for the inspiration she gave me today. 

If you see a friend without a smile;
give them one of yours.
Proverb – Author Unknown