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Time to Spend and to Save

March 9, 2007 by Liz Leave a Comment

I've been thinking . . .

“Beginning in 2007, most of the United States begins Daylight Saving Time at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March . . ” This year that is March 11.

The clocks are about to change. I heard a bird yesteday. Soon it will be spring. I hope I get to see it. The tulips are my favorite.

My life has started speeding up. Gee, like it hasn’t been fast all along. Projects are reaching their launch. Big events are happening. SOBcon is one week. My son graduates from college the next. How can time go by faster than it already has?

Spring forward one hour — one hour less. I don’t need less. More might be useful.

Daylight Savings Time. Who is saving mine? I only know who is spending it. That would be me.

Sometimes, without thinking, I spend and save time simultaneously.

We’re on the porch in Massachusetts. My husband is fixing my glasses. My son smiled, “So, you finally found a use for him.”

We’re in the living room in Illinois. I wrote a poem for a kindergarten lesson. “You think you’re five, but you’re only four-thirty,” joked my husband.

I hear my father saying, “If you sleep on the floor, you’ll never have to worry about falling out of bed.”

My my older, older brother called on our 23rd wedding anniversary. “Tell your husband I said he chose wisely.”

When I was small, time was huge, unending, constantly thrusting me forward. But that’s not time, no, not really. Time’s not a moving, unbending force upon me.

Time is a paradox of meaningful or meaningless moments. We can lose track of it We can waste it or wait for our time to be over.

If we’re lucky we find that time is the one thing we can spend by living and save in memories..

Spring back and breathe.

I don’t need to save time, or find time or make more time in my life.

I need to spend more time that I can save as memories.

Liz's Signature
via letting me be

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: balance, bc, Ive-been-thinking, thinking, time-for-life

Words in a Safety Box . . .

December 8, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

I've been thinking . . .
When I was in college, my mom told me about a box that she kept in the back my bedroom closet. It was there the whole time I was growing up. The box was a torn, sad, brown corrugated, hardly worth remembering — but I remembered it. From time to time, as a tiny curious person, I would crawl back into the deep, dark depths of my closet to see what secrets were kept there.

I was not too good at refolding box tops and that box had the four sides folded in –in the way people do when tape isn’t an option. The center where they met had been smashed from years of heavier boxes being set upon it. In every way, it was a box perfectly designed never to capture the interest of a child. So the box could, and did, hide in plain view most of my childhood.

Inside that box, at any given moment, sat about twenty percent of my current ownership of toys. Every so often, my mother would rotate a few toys into and out of that box. She said that I never missed the toys that went into the box. She said that when toys came back out, I acted as if they were brand new. My mother said the box taught me to take care of my toys and value them. My mother should have been a child toy psychologist.

Over the years, I’ve come to think of that broken brown box as a toy safety box.

I’ve often thuoght I wish we had a safety box like that for words.

Important words get tossed around like old toys do. Some words once had truly great meanings — words such as truly and great. They seem to have lost their depth and sparkle. In my heart, I know that the first time someone wrote yours truly, it meant more. So, too did the word, sincerely. Do people think what they are saying when they write them? What about when they write Love?

I wonder. What about when we write wonder?

Words are so important. They need the depth of meaning that they were born with.

Good once was good. Nice used to roll nicely off the tongue. Beautiful it was so breathtaking, it never needed a very to help it. Imagine how great something or soemone great used to be — someone like Alexander.

Joy might be the word I miss the most.

At one time joy filled a heart. I think about joy. I wish for joy, and I wish joy for my friends, and yet when I write the word, it seems shallow, not conveying how deeply I wish for them.

Joy is exponentially greater than the happiness we all seek, but the word has been made flat like old soda. Now it calls up thoughts of Seasons Greetings and green box bottoms with clear covers in drug stores every November. It’s laced with cranky people standing in lines at cash registers. How can I wish true joy when it conjures up images of chaos and too much to do?

I wish we could hide words the way my mother hid my toys. I wish we could place them in a safety box, back in my childhood closet until they were new again.

We might have to learn a few new words. We might to stop and think about the words we choose, but maybe that could lead to new thoughts. Would that be so bad?

We might even leave some words in the box to stay there until we understood their power — words we don’t need, words that hurt., words that separate people.

It would be good to take heartfelt words off advertising. where we don’t really mean them. That might lead us to find new ways to express ideas. We could let the words we put away stay gone for months and see how we do at communicating.

When we brought the over-used words back, we might find that we think differently about them. We might not use them not so frequently, not so frivolously. We might not put them on billboards.

I want to know joy, good will, and peace as something more than words on a Christmas card.

Joy. Love. Beauty. Quality. Forgiveness. Peace. Hope. Truth. Friend. Hero. Loyalty. Value. Add your own words here.

I wish you all of those words — the real ones.

Liz's Signature

adapted from letting me be

Filed Under: Business Life, Motivation, Successful Blog, Writing Tagged With: bc, Ive-been-thinking, safety-box-for-words, thinking

A Friday Priorities List — 2 Rules and a Bunch of Ideas to Leave Work Behind

September 29, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

I've been thinking . . .
I’ve been thinking how, at one time in my life, the ones who saw the worst of me were people I was closest to. It’s like the song.

You always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn’t hurt at all. You always break the kindest heart, with a hasty word you can’t recall.
.

I’m listening to Willie Nelson sing it now. (Moonlight Becomes You)

I was young. I let my guard down with them. It was a sign of trust that I let them see my bad side. Gosh. don’t you bet they were thrilled I would do that for them?

I’m a slow learner sometimes.

Imagine if everyone dumped their bad feelings on loved ones in the name of trust.

I’m not quite sure what woke me up. When my brain and my heart finally reattached, my thinking kicked in. I realized that I was treating people I hardly knew far better than the ones that I loved. I was a success at working for a living, but not such a success at having a life.

2 Rules and a Bunch of Ideas

So I made this list that I check every Friday. It’s not written stone — more like it’s etched in ice. But it does remind me what to think about when Friday rolls around. It’s two rules and a bunch of ideas to focus on so that I leave work behind.

Two Rules

  • RULE 1: Weekends are recreational or recuperative.
  • RULE 2: Except in rare emergencies, all work is “want to,” not “have-to” stuff.

A Bunch of Ideas

  • Plan an activity with someone I love just because we want to do it.
  • Spend time listening to someone special.
  • Do something spontaneous with a friend.
  • Make someone laugh.
  • Call someone I haven’t talked to in years.
  • Learn something new with a friend or a loved one.
  • Read a book.
  • Take two naps.
  • Make cookies. Find lots of folks to share them with.
  • Do something I’ve never done before.
  • Do something I’ve not done in years.
  • Do something that someone else decides is important.
  • Try on some gratitude and generosity
  • .

Of course, your list might look totally different from mine . . . .

Now I let my closest people see the best of me. I like me a lot better this way. As it turns out, they seem a whole lot nicer too.

Liz's Signature

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, Outside the Box, Successful Blog, Writing Tagged With: bc, thinking, Willie-Nelson, You-Always-Hurt-the-One-You-Love

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